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UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 



THE ELIZABEIHAN INFLUENCE ON THE TRAGEDY 

OF THE LATE EIGHTEENTH AND THE 

EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURIES 



BY 

WILLIAM PAGE HARBESON 

University of Pennsylvania 



A THESIS 

PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN 

PARTLIL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR 

THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 



WICKERSHAM PRIN^-ING COMPANY 

LANCASTER, PA. 

I92I 



UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 



me ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE ON THE TRAGEDY 

OF THE LATE EIGHTEENTH AND THE 

EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURIES 



BY 

WILLIAM PAGE HARBESON 
University of Pennsylvania 



A THESIS 

PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN 

PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR 

THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 



WICKERSHAM PRINTING COMPANY 

LANCASTER, PA. 

I92I 



.H3 



GIFT 

UNiVERSjTV 

OCT ?3 '26 






INTRODUCTION 
s 
o 
^ This work purposes an examination of tragedy during 

parts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for evidence 
of an Elizabethan revival. The drama made a considerable 
contribution to the literature of the Romantic Period. It ex- 
perienced reaction against the extreme classicism of Pope and 
Boileau, as did poetry; and like poetry it expressed the re- 
action in a freer form, a deeper lyric feeling, and an increased 
appreciation of natural background. That the results in the 
field of drama are disappointing intrinsically and in quantity 
with those in other literary fields is due to a set of causes that 
need not be discussed here. The phenomena, however, were 
unquestionably present. In the plays of the later eighteenth 
century one becomes increasingly aware that the ennui of the 
age and the prosaic character of its life are producing a nat- 
ural revulsion of feeling; one notices, slightly at first, then 
very evidently, the influence of romantic forces like the 
Reliques, the researches of Gray and Warton, the Garrick 
Shakespeare, and later the strong tides of German romanti- 
cism. 

Each of these new tendencies pointed back to the glamor of 
an older time, when life, partly it is true because of retrospect, 
but partly also because of its inherent qualities, was a colorful 
pageant, and a happily unlearned people still felt the mystery 
of existence and wonder about things eternal. Playwrights 
and poets alike experienced that " Revival of the Middle 
Ages " that Heine gives as his definition of romance. 

The term " Middle Ages," however, is an elastic one. Its 



A ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

iconography has been settled now within properly philological 
and historic limits. But in an age like the Augustan in Eng- 
land, when a certain satisfaction for the present was combined 
with a contemptuous tolerance of what had gone before, when 
Milton and Bunyan had to be apologized for and Pope and 
Johnson passed strictures on the coarseness of Shakespeare, — 
in such an age the Middle Ages meant almost any time before 
the happy advent of Charles II, and very often the time of 
Elizabeth and James. Walpole, explaining the inspiration of 
the Castle of Otranto, asseverated an ambition to re-create the 
charm of romantic feudal times — and mentioned Shakespeare 
in the same breath. The revival, in other words, was quite as 
much a revival of the romanticism of the Renaissance as of 
the earlier and stricter romanticism, with an increased pro- 
duction of the old plays and later of a natural effort to emulate 
their success by their means. 

The task here will be to examine the dramatic output of 
the time, first of all for any evidences of reaction against the 
old order; then for traces of a romantic feeling that suggests 
the Elizabethan, either unconsciously or consciously. In an 
analysis of this kind one has no definite measure wherewith to 
work. There is simply the knowledge of certain peculiarities 
of form that inhere in the earlier plays ; certain definite types 
of drama that are popular; family resemblances in characters 
and the way of portraying them, and a philosophy underlying 
the whole fabric that varies greatly in the several tragedies 
but that can be classed generally and labelled " Elizabethan ". 
Some of the newer plays will of course be easily classed. It 
needs no experience to place Hull with the definitely classic 
school, and influenced largely by Voltaire; or Beddoes with 
the definitely Elizabethan, influenced by Marston and Tour- 
neur. The difficulty lies between, where there is a mixture of 
romantic elements and classic, where there are several types 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 5 

of romantic in combination, or where the influence is not so 
clearly referable to a definite source. 

The matter of time limitations in a case of this kind is not 
an entirely simple one. The Romantic movement in England 
was not so clearly defined as it was on the Continent, but 
rather a series of forces acting with varying intensity over a 
period of about a hundred years. The natural course in 
searching for a starting point would seem to be an examina- 
tion of the early eighteenth century for any striking play or 
series of plays that, by their success or the criticism they in- 
vited, pointed away from the established order. 

Working on this principle, one comes early across the name 
of George Lillo, whose first play was written in 1731. Lillo 
was a man who had everything in his favor as a potential 
rebel against dramatic traditions. He was of foreign extrac- 
tion. He was engaged in trade. Consequently he was not 
bound up with the literary hierarchy of well-bred gentlemen 
who wrote most of the drama of the time. He knew the 
viewpoint of the man of the street, and possibly shared it. 
The triumph of at least one of his plays proves a definite 
popular appeal; and the appreciation of Pope and Fielding, 
and the extended influence of " Barnwell " and " Fatal Curi- 
osity " abroad, are forces that must be reckoned with in any 
study of the new romance. 

Three of the Lillo plays are worth studying from the stand- 
point of a possible departure from one tradition, and a pos- 
sible return to an earlier one. They are " George Barnwell ", 
" Fatal Curiosity ", and " Arden of Feversham ". In the 
titles themselves there is a simplicity not evident in most of 
the tragedies of the time ; and the last promises something as 
an index of what an eighteenth-century man would do with a 
sixteenth-century drama. 

George Barnwell has an arresting prologue and address to 



5 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

the reader, in which the author states his creed and purpose. 
His premises are these: iirst, that common Hfe is as well 
suited to tragedy as the life of kings ; secondly, that prose can 
express great emotion as well as verse, and being understood 
by a greater number will achieve, third, the inculcation of the 
moral, which is the chief end of drama. 

The theme is taken from an old ballad, and deals with the 
ruin of a youth by a courtesan, his fall leading to murder 
and the gallows. In other words, there is the suggestion of 
a return to the Elizabethan domestic tragedy. The under- 
lying conditions are the same : a story from real life, dealing 
with middle-class folk, and to be treated with realism. Lillo 
knew something of this type of tragedy, as is shown by his 
revision of "Arden", and one questions whether the reading 
of the old play and others like it led to his own first attempt, 
or whether the success of his first play led to a search for 
earlier themes of a similar type. At any rate " Barnwell " 
presents a strong contrast to the contemporary work of Fen- 
ton, Brooke and Hill in the baldness of its narrative, which 
suggests a tract or court record.^ 

Unquestionably the most compelling character, and the one 
most like life, is Marwood. She has the evil of Vittoria 
Corombona with none of her intellect or poetic force; and 
reminds one a little of Alice in " Arden ". The reading is 
logical; Marwood is wily and cruel to the end; there is no 
moralizing with her, no deathbed repentance. Here is a sug- 
gestion at least of the merciless characters of some of the older 
domestic dramas. 

The other characters suggest many analogues. 

1 " The more extensively useful the moral of a tragedy is the more ex- 
cellent that piece must be of its kind." (George Barnwell, Address to 
Reader.) 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 7 

Thoroughgood is the incarnation of prose. He is before all 
a merchant, a middle-class man who exults in his trade. 

"As the name of merchant never degrades the gentleman, so 
by no means does it exclude him." (Act i, Sc. i) 

What imagination he has is given over to argosies and the 
romance of trade : 

" The populous east, luxureant, abounds with glittering gems, 
bright pearls, aromatic spices, and health-restoring drugs: the 
late found western world's rich earth glows with unnumbered 
veins of gold and silver ore. On every climate, and on every 
country Heaven has bestowed some good peculiar to itself." 
(Act HI, Sc. I) 

These two bits of his conversation give also a suggestion of 
his hobby — a tendency to moralize at all times. One is con- 
scious, too, of a not too pleasant unction, almost an obsequi- 
ousness, when parleying about the nobility; for though busi- 
ness may ennoble a man, still there is the old tradesman's 
respect for rank. 

"You are not insensible" (speaking to his daughter. Act I, 
Sc. i) that it is chiefly on your account that these noble lords do 
me the honor so frequently to grace my board. Should you be 
absent, the disappointment may make them repent of their con- 
descension and think their labor lost." 

The whole of his conduct and conversation recall Defoe. 
There is the same ostentatious attention to realistic detail, the 
same gift for homily. There is a suggestion of Richardson 
also, and the later novels of purpose; but nothing of the 
Elizabethan, either in the conception of the man or his char- 
acter. 

Maria and Barnwell offer still other elements. Barnwell, 



8 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

like his master, philosophizes largely, even when about to 
commit crime. His character is blurred, the change from 
innocent youth to criminality being accomplished with a rapid- 
ity hardly credible. The recollection one carries away is of a 
sentimental protagonist, given to tears, to high-flown language, 
and to slightly theatric action. When he bids his love adieu 
he speaks thus : 

" Would you, bright excellence, permit me the honor of a chaste 
embrace, the last happiness this world could give were mine. 
Exalted goodness ! Oh turn your eyes from earth and me ta 
Heaven, where virtue, like yours, is ever heard. Pray for the 
peace of my departing soul. Early my race with wickedness 
began and soon I reached the summit." (Act V, Sc. 2) 

Maria gives her fortune to aid the criminal, but like the 
heroine in the old song she never tells her love, but pines away, 
forgiving all, even the murderer, and swoons when she is 
finally taken away from him. 

These unhappy lovers again suggest not the sixteenth cen- 
tury but that in which Lillo lived. There is the lachrymose 
weakness that characterizes Sterne, Richardson, Mackenzie; 
the glozing of fault and the weakening of tragic intensity 
that one notices in Rowe and Steele. 

This curious conclusion is found also in the language of the 
play. Lillo takes his stand almost defiantly for prose. Yet 
he either has too much affection for the rhetorical drama of 
his time, or realizes that in great moments a prosaic character 
may rise to poetry; for he falls frequently into a strange 
rhythmic prose. 

Barnwell has just killed his uncle, and bends over his body. 
This is his rhapsody : 

" Expiring saint ! Oh murdered martyred uncle ! Lift up your 
dying eyes and view your nephew in your murderer ! Oh do not 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES g 

look so tenderly upon me ! Let indignation light from your eyes 
and blast me ere you die. By heaven, he weeps, in pity of my 
woes! The murdered, in the agonies of death, weeps for the 
murderer," etc. (x\ct III, Sc. 4) 

At still other times, when the homiletic vein is in the ascen- 
dant, he speaks in rhymed couplets of a doggerel value, sug- 
gesting the ballad from which the play w^as taken : 

" Be warned, ye youths, and see my sad despair ; 
Avoid lewd women, false as they are fair. 
By reason guided, honest joys pursue: 
The fair to honour and to virtue true 
Just to herself, will ne'er be false to you. 
By my example learn to shun my fate: 
(How wretched is the man who's wise too late!) 
Ere innocence, and fame, and life, be lost, 
Here purchase wisdom cheaply, at my cost." (Act IV, Sc. 2) 

One puts together these bits of dialogue with the sugges- 
tions they give as to the character of the speakers. The con- 
clusion one is prone to make after a reading of Barnwell is 
something like this : 

Lillo had a domestic tragedy to relate that suggested in its 
facts the Elizabethan variety. But he lived at a time after 
England had felt the rule of Puritanism and the rise of many 
new dissenting sects, after the Bill of Rights had made Eng- 
land a constitutional monarchy and the middle-class man the 
arbiter of the nation's future; a time when business was ex- 
panding and the novel was beginning to express the ordinary 
man; a time finally when sentimentalism as expressed by 
Steele and the " She-tragedy " of Rowe had their vogue upon 
the stage. Lillo reflected strongly all of these things. In 
Barnwell, at least, his domestic tragedy is Elizabethan only in 
its freedom of form and its general type; the rest belongs 
quite as much to its time as the work of his less known con- 
temporaries. 



lO ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

" Fatal Curiosity " is a more consistent play, and more 
powerful in its appeal. The shambling prose-poetry is aban- 
doned for traditional blank verse; a verse in this case which 
seldom rises to memorable lines, but which is always fluent 
and dignified. The fable is Elizabethan in point of time. 
There is the same use of middle-class characters as in Bam- 
well, the same insistence on detail. But the suggestion is not 
so much of a domestic tragedy as of an attempt to revive the 
Greek drama of destiny. Old Wilmot and his wife are ad- 
mirable in their cynical melancholy. Everything in the drama, 
accidents, portents, the simplest actions of the dramatis 
personae seem to lead to murder, to force it upon the old un- 
fortunates. When their crime has been revealed they waste 
no time in whining. They are protagonists of the old sort, 
Wilmot looks almost savagely at those who would comfort 
him. 

" What whining fool art thou who would'st usurp 
My sovereign right to grief? — ^Was he thy son? " (Act III, Sc. i) 

he says, and stabs himself. One feels that the aged criminals 
are not to blame ; they are playthings in the hands of a malic- 
ious fortune. 

Young Wilmot and his love are eighteenth-century senti- 
mentalists again, with artificial sentiment and Grandisonian 
politeness and figures of speech. The impression from Barn- 
well was of an Elizabethan subject treated by a man who had 
read Defoe and Steele. Here it is of a Greek play, with 
eighteenth-century sentimentality figuring in the younger 
people, but leaving unmarred the father and mother and the 
general action. 

" Arden of Feversham " in the later version is an excellent 
play for analysis. Here a man with independent ideas and 
interest either in the earlier drama or the simple type of story, 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 1 1 

that formed the theme of one variety of that drama, attempts 
a version for the contemporary stage. How nearly will he 
keep to the spirit of the original? It is a fair test of Lillo's 
romanticism. 

The earlier "x\rden" is a very powerful but very unpleasant 
play. There is no element of sacrifice, there is no feeling of 
great pity. The victim is a somewhat covetous merchant who 
is revealed as a hard landlord; after his death his friend, 
Franklin, announces to the assembled world that the disaster 
is the fruit of covetousness ; hardly the type for a hero. The 
rest of the characters, with the possible exception of Michael, 
are a pretty pack of rascals. Yet the play thrills the reader 
in an indescribable way because of its uncanny realism. The 
baldness of the popular ballads is present, also their singularly 
happy choice of suggestive detail. It is as if the unknown 
author had admitted his reader to a few scenes from common- 
place life, presenting exactly the vital scenes, recording just 
exactly the conversation to stamp the actors forever on the 
mind. There is no unity of scene; but a certain insistency of 
purpose, whereby everything leads to the murder, a crisis that 
is brought to pass in spite of the fates that seem to shield the 
victim, makes other unity unnecessary. There is that strange 
combination of utter brutality, broad comedy, and wonderful 
poetry that one finds in the drama of the earlier time. An 
excellent model for a man of Lillo's temperament. 

The revised version presents many changes. The Reede 
incident is omitted, likewise the final scene and all of the 
matter dealing with the painter. Several of the scenes are re- 
arranged and the whole drama condensed into a careful prep- 
aration for the climax. All of this is theatrically effective; it 
is suited to an eighteenth-century audience and does not de- 
stroy the inherent value of the original. 

There are other changes. Either the reviser's theatrical in- 



12 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

tuition, or his sympathy or sentiment have noted the absence 
of pity and loveHness. Consequently one notices many differ- 
ences in character. Arden becomes more gracious; we hear 
no more of his cupidity; the scenes with his wife are dwelt on 
to show his intense affection for her; and at his death it is 
her confession of complicity that furnishes the last blow. 
Alice becomes Alicia, no longer the goddess of the machine 
but a tool in the hands of Mosbie. It is true she has fallen. 
She has even tried to murder her sleeping husband (an inci- 
dent originating with Lillo). But remorse harries her. She 
consents feebly to the plot against Arden. She is present at 
the death, praying Heaven the while to forgive her, and she 
confesses and offers herself to justice as an expiation for her 
sin after attempting the life of Mosbie. In other words, she 
becomes the sentimental protagonist, like Barnwell, commit- 
ting crime under duress, and provocative of sympathy rather 
than scorn. This change is unquestionably an asset to a full 
theatre, but it unquestionably mars the play, smudging the 
drawing of the central character and damaging its greatest 
asset — ^realism. Michael goes through a like purging, emerg- 
ing a weak, shadowy boy, lacking both the humor and like- 
ness to life of his namesake in the old version. A possible 
gain in sympathy is made in this way at an immense loss in 
strength. No scene illustrates this so well as the great one of 
the murder. The early play presents the facts sternly in the 
old ballad manner. Alice does not hesitate to stab her hus- 
band : 

"What! groans thou? nay, then give me the weapon! 
Take this for hindering Mosbie's love and mine." (Act V, Sc. i) 

And then she directs Susan to wash away the blood. She is 
superstitious. The blood will not out, with all her scrubbing, 
because she " blushed not ". Her courage gives way when 
Mosbie proposes a toast to her husband on the arrival of 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 13 

Franklin. But once the body is out of sight she recovers her 
composure and thinks only of Mosbie ; 

" I have my wish in that I joy thy sight 
— We'll spend the night in dalliance and sport." (Act V, Sc. i) 

When the Mayor accuses her with the blood, she is ready 
with an answer. 

" It is the pig's blood we had to supper. 
But wherefore stay you? find out the murderers." (Act V, Sc. i) 

— not weakening until she is led away to gaol. Lillo's rear- 
rangement is dramatic. It has many happy touches. But it is 
not entirely convincing. Alicia has to excuse her participation 
in the crime. Although a prime-mover in the plot, she re- 
pents, invokes Heaven to aid the villain, calls on Arden, nearly 
reveals the plot to her husband, and attempts to stab the very 
man for whom it is all done. Mosbie asks her how she fares ; 

" As the howHng damned, and thou my hell . . . 

Might but the silent grave 

When it receives me to its dark abode, 

Hide, with my dust, my shame ! — ^0 might that be 

And Arden's death revenged ! 'Tis my sole prayer ; 

If not, may awful justice have her course! " (Act V, Sc. i) 

The scene is not consistent with the original play, or the char- 
acter with her earlier history. 

Much of the excellent blank verse of the original has been 
retained. But Lillo shows curious ideas in his excisions. 
Poetry for poetry's sake apparently does not please him. 
That splendid, though perhaps unnecessary bit of description 
from Bradshaw : 

"A lean-faced writhen knave, 
Hawk-nosed and very hollow-eyed. 
With mighty furrows in his stormy brows ..." (Act II, Sc. 2) 



14 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

is omitted altogether. This cut may be defensible from the 
standpoint of brevity. Not so-, however, is the like omission 
of the dialogue between Greene and Shakebag, which is not 
only beautiful poetry in itself but really a part of the char- 
acter development. We have Shakebag left, but he is less in- 
teresting and above all less Elizabethan. Other instances 
could be cited of the ridding of the play of much good poetry, 
until it exists merely for its narrative of crime : hardly any of 
those flashes that distinguish the earlier age are left. Even the 
phrases left are shorn of their artless beauty. 

" My golden time was when I had no gold." (Act III, Sc. 5) 

issues from Medea's kettle prose : 

" Oh happiest was I in my humble state." (Act V, Sc. 2) 

Sometimes it is merely the alteration of a word that spoils 
the charm. Compare : 

" Each gentle stirry gale doth shake my bed.' (Act III, Sc. 5) 
with 

" The gentlest gales of summer shake my bed." (Act V, Sc. 2) 

The play is a good one even in its reformed condition. But 
the reviser has lost many of the very things that gave it its 
Elizabethan quality. The dialogue has been shortened and 
toned down; yet it is that very combination of violence and 
imagination that makes the original impressive. The pro- 
tagonists likewise have been toned down and sentimentalized 
to suit a new age — shadows of their old selves. It is an 
eighteenth-century, polite version of the old tale of lust and 
blood. 

From the evidence of his three chief plays, Lillo would 
seem to be a man who had no great knowledge of or apprecia- 
tion for the earlier age. He had an idea, the carrying of 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 15 

tragedy into the field of common folk. To this he carried his 
tradesman's love of moralizing and the sentimentaHty he 
found about him. He chose old themes apparently because 
they were in harmony with his principles, not because they 
were Elizabethan; and in the treatment of them he remains 
the man of his time, with the facile emotion, the perfervid 
and stilted dialogue, the general niceness and perhaps a little 
of the lack of imagination that characterized so many play- 
wrights of the century. 

There is no question about Lillo's historic importance. In 
an inquiry of this kind, however, one is greeted with more 
evidence of what he might have done than what he actually 
did. He approached the old drama not with a literary in- 
terest, but with that of a practical stage-writer. He returned 
accidentally to the things Elizabethan because domestic tragedy 
coincides with his ideas. The day of the conscious literary 
revival was later. 

The sixth decade of the eighteenth century seems a hopeful 
one in which to look for the springs of real romanticism in 
English drama; hopeful because by that time, or during that 
time, so many branches of literary activity were showing signs 
of awakening interest in the past, of dissatisfaction with the 
ideas and expression of the present. We need make only a 
hasty review to see that by 1765, the date of The Castle of 
Otranto, practically all the forces were operative that tri- 
umphed in Blake and Burns. While the romantic revolution 
had produced as yet no single great apostle, it had affected 
strongly almost every type of literature. 

There is a revival of interest in nature to be found in 
Thompson, Dyer, Shenstone and Akenside. There is a re- 
newed interest in freer poetic forms than those used by Dr. 
Johnson, that issued from the new cultus of Milton and Spen- 
ser. Thomson's Seasons suggests a fresh field in the use of the 



l5 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

preternatural and superstitious as literary material. Gray's 
Elegy, Written in a Country Churchyard is an example of the 
elegiac spirit found also in Blair and Collins. The novel marks 
a step forward with its interest in man; and with Sterne and 
Goldsmith a breaking-away from the selfishness and hardness 
that were undercurrents of eighteenth-century life, for the 
sympathy of the nineteenth. The word Gothic is no longer a 
term of quiet contempt as in Addison's time : Catholic architec- 
ture is spoken of with enthusiasm, and collectors like Walpole 
search eagerly for the furniture and armor of the Middle 
Ages. 

All this is symptomatic of a deep interest in the past, an 
interest that lies at the bottom of romanticism. Scholarship 
was affected like everything else. Stevens and Malone showed 
this by their laborious researches. Gray contemplated a his- 
tory of poetry, a project later fulfilled by Thomas Wart on. 
The old castles became subjects of interest; and buildings 
were built, supposedly on the old plan, like Strawberry Hill. 

Toward the middle of the century these forces, at first 
hardly apparent, cr}^stallized in a number of remarkable docu- 
ments. The Elegy Written in the Country Churchyard was 
published in 1 75 1 ; the Introduction a I'Histoire de Danemarc, 
1755; Percy's Five Runic Pieces, 1763; Kurd's Letters on 
Chivalry and Rotnance, 1762; Gray's Descent of Odin and 
The Fatal Sisters, 1765 ; The Castle of Otranto, 1765 ; Percy's 
Reliques, 1765; the first instalment of Ossian, 1760; Chatter- 
ton's fragments, 1767- 1770. Those years were crowded with 
achievement worth noting from an intrinsic point of view, 
and from the historical, decidedly significant. 

It would seem natural at this time, then, to look for some 
similar movement in the dramatic field. At first sight the out- 
look is promising. The Shakespearean revivals of Garrick 
were markedly successful, and though Shakespeare outdis- 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 



17 



tanced all the other Elizabethans, there are performances from 
time to time of Jonson, Marlowe, Shirley. The public was 
interested in the production at least of certain of the older 
plays. And in 1757, the date of Douglas, this revival of the 
old spirit has apparently caught the new drama. Here was a 
play lauded by Gray, one of the distinct high priests of the 
new movement, as having " retrieved the true language of the 
stage, dead these hundred years " ; as being, despite its faults, 
a very powerful play. Douglas found its origin in an old 
ballad. It held the stage for fifty years at least. It was 
looked upon as the harbinger of great things on the stage. 
How far was this trust justified? How far did romance enter 
into the drama after its production ? What kind of romance ? 

To answer these questions let us examine the dramatic out- 
put from the date of Home's masterpiece, to 1785, the date of 
the production of The Sorrows of Werfher, which introduced 
romanticism of an entirely different kind. 

The result of an inquiry of this sort is somewhat disappoint- 
ing. There is not much new tragedy; the number of new 
tragedies seems to diminish as the time goes on; and the 
romantic influence is not comparable to that found in poetry. 
Even men like Thompson and Mason, freed to a certain extent 
from the poetic bonds of their time, when they essayed the 
drama fell short of success. They did not seem tO' under- 
stand the form. The reason was probably that their interest 
was principally lyrical rather than dramatic; so they took to 
Spenser and Milton first, and Shakespeare only secondarily; 
and they enjoyed Shakespeare for the poetry rather than the 
drama — A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. 

At any rate the age produced few tragedians worthy of 
rank, and few memorable tragedies. The serious drama be- 
tween our arbitrary dates, 1757-1785, may be divided in a 
general way into three classes : ( i ) Those that follow classic 



J 8 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

models; (2) an indefinite group adhering generally to the 
English tradition modified by the practice of the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries; (3) those that show any romantic 
tendency. Of course this is merely a working division. The 
lines of demarcation between the classes are shadowy. There 
is something of a family likeness in all. Still we do feel 
these lines of cleavage, and they are useful in an analysis of 
the drama. 



The Classic Type 

The word classic is an unfortunately indefinite one, having 
very different meanings for different people. In architecture 
it may mean the classic of the Pantheon, of the Parthenon, ot 
the Chateau of Versailles, or the Church of St. Pancras in 
London ; in art may mean equally well the spirit of Watteau 
or of Ingres. So in literature of the eighteenth century it 
may suggest work following Voltaire just as well as that 
modelled on Euripides. No great definition of the term is 
necessary here, for the simple reason that in the drama prac- 
tically all of the variations of the word are to be found. The 
only generalization that can be made is that the civilization of 
the century of Gray and Johnson was Roman classic rather 
than Greek; that the Roman idea came largely through the 
by-way of France ; and that because of this all the work has a 
tinge of the French about it, or was written under the rules 
laid down in France. In the classic dramas subsequent to 
Douglas, some aim nobly to imitate the Greek, some seem 
simply to follow the classic tradition of Rome as it was handed 
down through France, and some frankly imitate the modern 
classic of Voltaire. As in the larger grouping one class shades 
off into another, but we can here, as there, find fairly well- 
marked examples of all. 

(a) The Greek Spirit 

There is a rather surprising interest in Attic models during 
the eighteenth century, shown in various ways. Genest num- 
bers adaptations of Euripides and Sophocles, some of which 
were presented at the regular theatres. These two masters 
suggested the fables for many playwrights; and that they 

19 



20 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

were widely read is proved by the claim of many dramatists 
that they had taken hints from Greek tragedy when the result 
did not seem to bear it out. Murphy in his Akuma (1773) 
claimed to have taken hints from Sophocles and Euripides; 
Thompson's Edward and Eleanora (written 1739) was mod- 
elled on Euripides; Delap's Royal Suppliants on Eschylus; 
Home's Alfred took hints from Sophocles. There were edi- 
tions of the three great poets in English, showing a literary 
demand as well as a dramatic. How far the borrowing was 
direct, of course, and how far it came through France is an- 
other matter. 

Of the new plays written on Greek models the most famous, 
and the most successful, were Elfrida and Caractacus, by Wil- 
liam Mason. Mason was a clergyman and dilletante, some- 
time chaplain to the King, a poet, a musician and a painter. 
As such his life was '' sequestered ", to use a favorite word 
of the dramatists of the time. He lived in a backwater, away 
from the struggle for existence that is meat to the dram- 
atist. Drama to him was rather a matter of literature than of 
life. He regarded it as might be expected of a cultured 
clergyman — through the large end of the opera-glass; he saw 
the clash of motives of mankind afar off, through the medium 
of his reading. It was natural that with his predilections he 
should admire the ancient drama; equally natural that with 
his lack of practical stage experience he should fail to see its 
inadaptability to the English stage. There is no doubt as to 
his purpose, however : to get back to the purely classic tradi- 
tion and write a play purified of the modern degradations. 

He seems not to have been sure at the outset of the practi- 
cability of his plan. He calls Elfrida a "dramatic poem" and 
attaches to it a justification in the form of several letters. 
Here he shows his creed : Good sense as well as antiquity pre- 
scribe the unities. Though tragedy is chiefly directed to the 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 2 1 

heart, it cannot obtain its end without the approbation of the 
judgment; and to secure this approbation the artificial con- 
struction of the fable goes a great way: witness the success 
of the French. Still it is inadvisable to ride one's hobby too 
hard, and may be difficult to create a Greek drama that will be 
correct in letter as well as spirit. Alilton perhaps went too far 
in his imitation, making in Samson Agonistes a drama more 
simple and severe than Athens herself would have demanded. 
The drama should adapt itself to the general taste. So, in- 
stead of taking the great Greek themes of patriotism and the 
distresses of royalty, which are a little forbidding in character, 
the dramatist will choose the affections raised rather from the 
instincts of common humanity, and characters as nearly like 
those of one's own country as tragic dignity will permit. He 
will choose for his subject an English theme ; and he will em- 
bellish his play with a romantic setting in an English forest. 

But above all, he holds a brief for the chorus. This, he in- 
sists, supplies the lyrical interest, binds the acts together, and 
adds pomp and majesty to the scene of the drama. Too much 
" business ", incident, bustle, have taken the place of simplicity 
and pathos in the modern stage, a happy change for the gener- 
ality of writers perhaps, but a distinct loss in the " embellish- 
ment of picturesque description, sublime allegory and what- 
ever comes under the denomination of pure poetry ". Mason 
pays an involuntary tribute to Shakespeare who has done all 
this naturally, and, " what is most strange ", joined it with 
pure passion. He regrets that the time in which Shakespeare 
lived, and his training, kept him from a knowledge of Greek 
models. There is still the eighteenth-century condescension 
toward the Elizabethans. 

With these things, then, he starts his play of Elfrida — an 
English theme in a picturesque barkground — to please the 
public — but with strict adherence to the unities, and the pres- 



22 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

ence of the chorus. That he was not entirely wrong in his 
calculations, that there was something appealing in the play, 
is proved by the twenty-seven performances Elfrida enjoyed 
when first produced, and by its later revival. 

The fable concerns the struggle between pure love and 
guilty love for a woman. Elfrida is hidden by her husband 
Athelwold to save her from his licentious King and master. 
But the King discovers her retreat and her husband's decep- 
tion of him, with results that cause the death of Athelwold 
and the retirement of his wife to a nunnery. 

The first thing noticeable in the play is what we would ex- 
pect, a difficulty in weaving together the lyric part of the play, 
the chorus, with the dramatic part, the actors. The drama 
opens with a soliloquy. The father of the heroine is looking 
for his daughter ; and the exposition unfolds rather awkwardly 
through a long speech. As he wanders he hears a chorus and 
catches the refrain. 

" Hail to thy living light, ambrosial morn, 
All hail thy roseate ray " — 

they sing. He listens and tries to account for their presence 
there : 

" The females, I suppose, 
Whom Athelwold has left my child's attendants." 

Hardly a very poetic description ; but when he addresses them 
he adorns his speech with unusual garniture : 

" Never yet 
Have I passed by the night bird's favorite spray. 
What time she pours her wild and artless song. 
Without attentive pause and silent rapture; 
How could I then with savage disregard 
Hear voices tuned by nature sweet as hers. 
Graced with all art's addition." 

In other words, there is a certain strain in order to unify the 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 23 

scene, and to make the man talk in the same key with the 
" virgins ", which immediately stiffens the reading of his 
characters. Sometimes the pull is the other way. The dram- 
atic action is atop; the virgins commence to speak, and their 
recitative loses its heroic character. 

" But hark, that certainty arrives. Methought 
I heard a winding horn. I did not err." 

Possibly because of this dual type of actor the characters 
are not well realized. There is nothing heroic about the 
heroine. She has none of the superb old Greek spirit, nor is 
she a daughter of the Saxons. She has caught the eighteenth- 
century ideal of weakness, sentimentality and extreme mod- 
esty. Her conversation is stilted and unnatural. She sees her 
father and turns to her companions : 

" Yes it is him ; it is my father, virgins, 
Support me or I faint! Oh wherefore, Sir?" 

And then acquiescing rather humbly to her father's vengeance 
on her husband : 

" Yes, he must fall. 

Yet pardon me if my poor trembling heart 

Puts up I know not what of prayers and vows 

To every pitying heart. Celestial guardians 

Of nuptial constancy! Oh bend from Heaven," etc. 

Her heart and eyes suffer much through the tragedy, yet at 
the end when her husband has been torn from her and killed, 
her only thought is a nunnery with constant weeping over the 
sainted clay. All of which is an unusual reading of a Saxon 
woman's character. 

The other characters are likewise mannered, all save iVthel- 
wold who seems fairly lifelike, like one of those figures in a 
dream that has more tangibility than the others. Instead of 



24 



ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 



placid, stilted and unnatural English, he uses something rea- 
sonably direct : 

" Go to the clear surface 

Of yon unruffled lake, and bending o'er it, 

There read my answer." 

The success of the play could hardly have been due to the 
characters. They have little relation to life. 

Nor is the plot much more successful from our point of 
view. The " business " that Mason so dislikes seems neces- 
sary to an English play. " Action ", as Dennis observes, " is 
the essence of drama." Here there is practically no action. 
We have exposition by soliloquy and dialogue, impending 
danger by more dialogue. But the actual climax takes place 
ofif the stage and has to be related by an attendant, while at 
the close the undramatic chorus escorts Elfrida to her retire- 
ment. 

The chorus unquestionably impedes the plot, yet it is the 
chorus that in a way furnishes the most interesting feature of 
the play, certainly from a historical point of view. Part of 
the time it joins in the ordinary dialogue (this part probably 
spoken) ; at other times it bursts forth into set forms — odes — 
which are unquestionably sung. Here is the chance for the 
lyric as opposed to the dramatic poet. And Mason is essen- 
tially a lyrist. He belonged to the school that followed Mil- 
ton, and wrote many poems in a distinctly Miltonic vein, the 
poems showing a real love of the pictorial in nature and an 
attempt to catch the word music of the great Puritan. 

The odes in the play have something to offer a curious 
reader. As soon as one reads the jfirst he feels the suggestion 
of an earlier age. 

" Hail to thy living light, 
Ambrosial morn! All hail thy roseate ray, 
That bids young nature all her charms display 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 25 

In varied beauty bright ; 
That bids each dewy-spangled flowret rise 
And dart around its vermeil dies; 
Bids silver lustre grace yon sparkling tide, 
That winding warbles down the mountain side." 

Milton, of course, comes to mind, the Milton of the Nativity 
Hymn. The two poems do not compare in merit, but there is 
in the imitation a joy in the beauty of the world about him 
which he sings in a form unusual to the majority in his time. 
Sometimes the suggestion is at first of the eighteenth cen- 
tury : 

" The turtle tells her plaintive tale 
Sequestered in some shady vale." 

But soon it takes on the earlier tone : 

" There goddess on the shaggy mound 
Where tumbling torrents roar around, 
Where pendant mountains o'er your head 
Stretch their reverential shade ..." 

And in the refrain redolent in form at least of his early master : 

" And o'er his saintly temples bland distil 
Seraphic day dreams of heaven's happiness," 

Sometimes Comiis is hinted at, sometimes the word arrange- 
ment of Paradise Lost. Through it all it is the rich pictorial 
in Milton that the later poet tries to imitate : " nectareous 
dews ", " sports and smiles a jocund train ". Not great poetry 
this, sometimes little more than travesty. But it is significant 
in the drama where so little but epigram and aphorism are to 
be found at this time. A poet is attempting to put new lyric 
suggestions into the drama and is at least partially succeeding. 
Nature, too, is a novelty; not the wild nature of Thomp- 
son's Hebrides. Everything is well groomed even to the lan- 
guage, which is mannered to a degree : 



26 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

" How nobly does this venerable oak 
Gilt with the glories of the orient sun 
Embosom your fair mansion ! The soft air 
iSalutes me with most cool and temperate breath, 
And as I tread the flower besprinkled lawn, 
Sends up a gale of fragrance." 

" an old oak spreads his awful arm 

Mantled in brownest foliage, and beneath 
The ivy, gadding from the untwisted stem 
Curtains each verdant side." 

— put in purely as he says for embellishment. Yet Mason has 
a sense of the pictorial, and it is the fine dignity of the play as 
a whole, with its highly-colored artificial background of nature 
and the music of the reminiscent odes that makes it not diffi- 
cult to read today and probably accounts for its early stage 
success. 

Caractaciis is a much better play. It was written later, after 
some experience with the acting stage and more knowledge of 
the technique of playwriting. We notice a gain in the ease of 
the opening. Exposition is this time by dialogue, dialogue 
that is fairly direct. As in Elfrida, the conversation has the 
eighteenth-century sententiousness, but it is less pompous and 
formal than in the earlier play. 

Eli: What means my brother? 
Vel: Dost thou refuse the charge? 
Eli: Dost thou accept it? 
Vel: It gives us liberty. 
Eli: It makes us traitors. 

Gods, would VeUimus do a deed of baseness? 

or again : 

" I would be anything save what I am." 

There is a distinct gain in the ease of the verse and its adapta- 
bility for conversation. 

The characters of Caractacus himself and of Vellimus are 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 



27 



fine and dignified. The old King is impetuous and rash; he 
damns his son without hearing him, then embraces him with 
transport when he finds himself in error. Something he is of 
a swashbuckler, something too of a stoic, as is shown in the 
last phase of the play — ^and the best. The Romans suggest 
his fate and what it might have been, and the best in him 
comes to the fore. 

Car: Soldier, I had arms, 

Had neighing steeds to whirl my iron cars, 
Had wealth, dominion. Dost thou wonder, Roman, 
I fought to save them? What if Caesar aims, 
To lord it universal o'er the world. 
Shall the world tamely crouch at Caesar's foot-stool? 
Aulns: 'Read in thy fate our answer. Yet if sooner 
Thy pride had yielded — 

Car: Thank thy gods, I did not. 

Had it been so, the glory of thy master. 

Like my misfortunes, had been short and trivial, 

Oblivion's ready prey : Now, after struggling 

Nine years, and that right bravely, 'gainst a tyrant, 

I am his slave to treat as seems him good; 

If cruelly, 'twill be an easy task 

To bow a wretch, alas! how bow'd already! 

Down to the dust: If well, his clemency. 

When trick'd and varnish'd by your glossing penmen. 

Will shine in honour's annals, and adorn 

Himself ; it boots not me. Look there, look there, 

The slave that shot that dart, kill'd ev'ry hope 

Of lost Caractacus ! Arise, my daughter. 

Alas! poor prince; art thou too in vile fetters! 

(to Elidurns.) 
Come hither, youth : Be thou to me a son, 
To her a brother. Thus with trembling arms 
I lead you forth ; children, we go to Rome. 
Weep'st thou, my girl? I prithee hoard thy tears 
For the sad meeting of thy captive mother : 
For we have much to tell her, much to say 
Of these good men, who nurtur'd us in Mona ; 
Much of the fraud and malice, that pursu'd us ; 
Much of her son, who pour'd his precious blood 



28 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

To save his sire and sister : Think'st thou, maid, 
Her gentleness can hear the tale, and live? 
And yet she must. O gods, I grow a talker ! . . . 



This may not be true to ancient British character, but it rings 
true to our ideas of what it might have been, which after all 
is just as good. 

As a drama, Caractacus is open to the same faults as its 
predecessor, but not to the same degree, since the magnificence 
of the pageantry, the picturesqueness of the background and 
increased spiritual action atone for the absence of the real 
events, which take place off stage as before. The chorus, too, 
seems better fitted into the order of things: it is natural in a 
Druidical grove, natural in a time of great national crisis; it 
has its justification as an engineer of fate, to suggest impend- 
ing catastrophe. The scene in the moonlit grove as the Druids 
descend and chant their incantation is a splendid one, dream- 
like perhaps and unreal — which is just as well. The word 
pictures are all good ; which brings us to the matter of diction 
and poetry. 

Nature is pictorial as before, but everything is better done : 

Behold yon oak, 
Hovir stern he frowns, and with his broad brown arms 
Chills the pale plain beneath him. 

It is more than a background ; it enters into the composition 
of the play and affects the characters. Caractacus in his 
trouble laments the peace of the scene about him : 

This holy place, methinks, doth this night wear 
iMore than its wonted gloom : Druid, these groves 
Have caught the dismal coloring of my soul. 
Changing their dark dun garbs to very sable, 
lln pity of their guest. Hail, hallowed oaks! 
Hail British born ! who last of British race, 
Hold your primeval rights by nature's charter; 
Not at a nod of Caesar. Happy foresters. 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 29 

Ye wave your bold heads in the hberal air; 
Nor ask, for privilege, a praetor's edict. 
Ye with your rough and intertwisted roots. 
Grasp the grim rocks ye sprung from; and, erect 
In knotty hardihood, still proudly spread 
Your leafy banners 'gainst the tyrannous north, 
Who Roman-like assails you. Tell me, druid, 
Is it not better to be such as these. 
Than be the thing I am. 

The chorus is suggestive of Milton in a more restrained way : 

Sleep and silence reign around ; 
Not a night-breeze wakes to blow ; 
Circle, sons, this holy ground; 
Circle close, in triple row. 

This is an echo of Comus, with a Httle of the feeling, too, of 

the Midsummer Night's Dream. 

There is a greater echo of Shakespeare in one of the later 

songs : 

Fear not now the fever's fire 
Fear not now the death-bed groan. 
Fangs that torture, pangs that tire. 
Bed-rid age with feeble moan. 

Of course we think of Cymbeline. But the later poet insists 
on a refrain in the manner of Spenser, spoiling much of the 
song quality of the lyric; and the next stanza has a different 
tone and tempo. These odes are not, in fact, the real lyrics 
of a play, but odes, formal, general undramatic " pieces " to 
be set to music and put into the drama. It is as if a man who 
had read much but created little were trying his hand in the 
manner of one after another of his favorite poets. 

Caractacus is a splendid play. Mason has essayed what 
Dryden suggested, a play with an English theme but with the 
conditions of the Greek theatre. While not entirely success- 
ful, he has produced a tragedy with some of the greatness of 



^Q ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

Samson Agonistes; it lacks the power of Milton's master- 
piece, but gains something in sympathy and picturesqueness. 
It is curious, too, that this drama, the farthest remove from 
anything like romantic intent, should have more of the new 
feeling than many of the plays definitely labelled as of the 
progressive school : a distinct gain in the appreciation of nature 
and the picturesque, and a struggle to achieve again some of 
the lyric quality of the earlier masters with their diction and 
music. It was a failure so far as lasting greatness was con- 
cerned, but a fine failure. 

A slight variation of the classic bias is found in the work 
of Dr. Delap, the friend of Mason, at one time his curate. 
His qualifications were those of his associate : he was a scholar 
of the drama, and a spectator rather than an actor in life. 
Three plays issued from his pen, in one of which he essays 
the new Celtic background — this will be treated in its place. 
The earlier ones remain true to the love of classic lore that 
distinguished so- many scholars of the time. Hecuba will serve 
as a fair example. 

This play discards the chorus, though supernumerary vir- 
gins are introduced as confidants — the author needs assistance 
of some agents of the kind. Otherwise he keeps even more 
rigorously to the Greek ideal than Mason. Mason had the 
wisdom to doubt the success of the old themes on a modern 
stage, and with his British suggestions achieved a species of 
success. Delap either lacked the intuition of his master or 
refused to sacrifice his ideals. 

Hecuba is founded in a general way on the Hecuba of 
Euripides, though the reviser has added a complication in the 
presence of a supposedly murdered son of the Queen, an ele- 
ment making for surprise of recognition and a certain dra- 
matic efifect ; an element very popular, too, with the dramatists 
of the time. 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 31 

No definite crisis is put before the spectator. Pyrrhus de- 
mands the sacrifice of Polyxena to gratify his vengeance. The 
demand comes at a time when the ambassador from Troy, 
Hecuba's son Eriphilus, though unknown to her, sues for her 
release. When the girl is led away to the altar, Eriphilus, in 
a rage, discovers his identity and finally stabs himself to avoid 
murder at the hands of his enemies who wish to extinguish 
Priam's line. Hecuba is left half mad, childless and alone. 
All of the characters were known to the Greeks and the pre- 
sentations could not but have been moving to them. To in- 
terest an English audience the author would need a certain 
skill in the unfoldment of character through fine declamation. 
This, unfortunately, Delap lacks. 

The declamation is heavy without being weighty. At times 
it essays the sententiousness of Addison : 

" That little tent, 
Spread in the darksome gloom of yon lone beech, 
Contains all Troy." 

There is little inspiration in any of it. In the recitative the 
best we can say is that it is free from false ornament. Other- 
wise the impression is of absolute frigidity. Here is the best 
example of narrative: 

Eumelus: 

Pyrrhus unsheath'd the sword— Quick at the fight, 
The youth approach'd.— She saw, and thus she spake. 
Heroes of Greece ! You who in ashes laid 
■My conquer'd country! Let no hand profane 
Touch me. My heart unshrinking meets the blow ! 
Not like a slave. — Heroes of Greece forbid ! 
But like great Priam's daughter, oh permit me, 
Free as my birth t'approach the gods below ; 
Not like a slave. — Heroes of Greece forbid! 
A fav'ring murmur followed; and the youth 
Drew back at Pyrrhus' nod. — (Down from her shoulders 
With rosy flame, she stript her virgin veil, 



32 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

And bar'd her beauteous breast, that far surpast 

Ev'n Dian's statue. Then upon one knee 

These mournful words she spake ; Lo, prince, my bosom, 

Deep in my heart the friendly faulchion fix — 

One wretched boon I beg — My breathless corse 

Unbought restore to my dear mother's arms. 

Oh let her tears the precious purchase pay! 

She said — Tears gush'd from every Grecian eye. 

Ev'n Pyrrhus paus'd. — Irresolute, aghast, 

He roU'd his eyes, and wildly struck the blow. 

She fell; and falling, carefully compos'd 

Her decent limbs — 

But the feature in which the tragedy falls farthest from 
grace is in its revelation of character. We have a right to 
expect greatness, heroism, from the Greeks and Trojans. We 
get nothing of the kind from this reading of them. Ulysses 
is wise, but hardly admirable. Hecuba is not the Hecuba we 
used to know. She has apparently read Collins and Mason. 
She likes gentle melancholy : 

I'll go with thee, my child, to good Pyrechines. 
There in the social sweets of friendly converse, 
Lose each sad moment, save when thou and I 
Sometime retire beneath the pensive gloom 
Of some sequestered poplar; there we'll sit 
And talk together o'er the buried virtues 
Of some loved friend. 

Or she will sit 

And ponder on my Polydore and death, 

When they ravish her daughter from her she speaks in this 

wise: 

Cast not on me 
iSuch fearful looks. Ye shall not see a tear. 
I will not struggle with th'opposeless might 
Of stern necessity. Now to my breast 
Comes resolution unappall'd by nature. 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 33 

No more a mother now, but queen of Troy. 

Or if great Hector's mother. — Hector's gone ! 

His spirit was too noble to stay here. 

And my Polyxena, my dear last child, 

— My last ! — my last, Sigea 1 — my last child ! 

Oh in thy bosom let me hide my tears ! 

Yes they are tears ! 

Spoken as a queen should speak, perhaps, yet it fails to move. 
As in the other lines Hecuba was the wailing heroine, here she 
is the heroine who plays to the crowd. " Yes they are tears." 
Like others she asks rhetorical questions in her grief, and re- 
cites a piece. The short exclamation she gives when her son 
dies is worth dozens of such lines : 

'Tis done ! 'Tis done. 

The children of Priam appear even less like themselves than 
their mother. Eriphelus resembles an old Greek much as 
Guido's dancing St. Michael resembles the mediaeval concep- 
tion. He minces through the play. His heart flutters much. 
Joy at time quite unmans him. He is Mr. Sentiment himself. 
Likewise, Polyxena. She welcomes those who kindly come to 
mix with her grief their social tears. She loves tears. She 
also is decorous to a degree. Even after the sacrifice she re- 
members as she dies, decently to compose her limbs. Dresden- 
china Trojans, all. 

Delap evidently knew his ancients, also Voltaire, Thompson, 
Collins, Mason. He tried a certain type play probably be- 
cause it bespoke tradition; but as he had no stagecraft or 
genius the result is what we might expect, bald, wooden. Dr. 
Johnson remarked that Delap knew neither art nor life, which 
was unkind ; but the best one can say is that Hecuba is a sin- 
cere attempt to treat an old theme in an old way. The effort 
was greater than the achievement. 



24 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

It is surprising to find John Home, the author of Douglas, 
in the classic group. Yet his entire life and training, his in- 
tellectual background, were such as to make him a conserva- 
tive rather than a radical in the dramatic field. One wonders 
if Douglas were really an accident after all, if the man simply- 
stumbled on something different. The rest of his literary out- 
put is either definitely classic or merely the echo of his great 
success. 

Home's training was similar to that of Mason and Delap — 
he was a clergyman with a taste for dramatics. He lived far 
away from the literary centers where the cult of Voltaire and 
of Addison reached its height, but he was not a product of 
the country, like Allan Ramsay. When he read, he read the 
literature of the time. When he wrote, his writing was of 
things remembered rather than things seen. He paid a poetic 
tribute to Shakespeare ; but in it he disclaimed any attempt to 
imitate the great master — whether because he disagreed with 
his artistic tenets or felt his own insufficiency he does not say. 
When he actually began to write, at any rate, he turned at 
once to the themes of Greece and Rome and the classic man- 
ner of presentation. 

Two of his plays, Agis and The Siege of Aquileia, are as 
orthodox in theme and treatment as the most conservative 
purist of the time could desire. 

Agis ran for only eleven nights, on the strength of Garrick's 
acting. The reader cannot help feeling that it needed all the 
resources the greatest actor of his time could bring, for it 
offers Httle to a latter-day examination. The legend con- 
cerned the later history of Greece and the struggle between 
Agis and his court. A strict presentation would have limited 
the action to the affairs of state, as in Delap's Hecuba; but 
Home, apparently worried about going too far with his classi- 
cism, introduced love interest to please English readers. Un- 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 35 

fortunately the love interest does not please them. One feels 
quite the same disgust for Lysander that he has for himself 
when he comes back to Sparta, practically abandoning his king, 
to interview so feeble a lady as Euanthe. Agis himself is a 
figure-head, talked about with gusto, but seldom appearing on 
the stage, and appearing only as a vehicle of sundry platitudes. 
There are no striking lines in the drama, not even the scrap 
of epigram to be found now and then in Delap. Nor is there 
aught of the picturesqueness or rhetoric of Mason. Here and 
there the lines reflect Home's reading. Now it is from the 

Bible: 

" Thy gods shall be my gods ; thy people mine." 

Now the eighteenth-century classicists: 

Bid vengeance and Lysander come tomorrow. 

Sometimes it is absolutely awkward : 

iMy valiant brother bears a generous mind, 
And though of arms enamored, justice loves. 

Always heavy and prosaic. The best lines in the play are 
almost directly from Plutarch. Taking it all together the 
author lacks both the dramatic and the poetic power necessary 
to carry out the plot. There is not a vestige of romance. It 
is hard reading. 

The Siege of Aquileia is, as might be hoped, much better. 
There is a clarity in the fable missing in the earlier play. The 
theme is big — the choice for a father between the safety of his 
sons and what he believes to be the honor of Rome. The 
unities are just as rigidly observed as before. The play is 
almost static. But there is a certain bigness in the back- 
ground, an ease in the verse and a dignity in the conception 
of Roman manners that carry the story along successfully. 
Reminiscences are to be found of Douglas, of Agis, of The 



36 



ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 



Orphan of China, possibly of Shakespeare in the use of dreams 
and portents; but the borrowings are well used, the man has 
learned something of theatrical technique. 

There is a similarity in all these classic or pseudo-classic 
plays. The authors were scholars. They read much. And, as 
was natural in the age, their tastes ran to classic things : to 
Greek things. It is not to be wondered at that they should 
feel little of the new movement for freedom that was becom- 
ing so evident in other fields, and at the end of an examination 
there is still the wonder that the man most loyal to the spirit 
of Greece was the only one to show the slightest hint of 
romanticism. 

It is odd that there is so much variety among these classic 
dramas. They lack the family feeling noticeable among the 
usual run of plays of the time. 

As soon as we approach the more practical playwrights we 
find a difference in idea and execution. The plays are still 
retrospective in subject — classic, in a word; but the classicism 
is not of Greece or Rome : it is founded on Voltaire. The in- 
fluence of the great Frenchman on English letters was far- 
reaching. Voltaire lived in England from 1726 to 1729. He 
incarnated in his dramas the ideals so popular with Addison 
and others. He knew his Shakespeare and admired Shakes- 
peare's plays — he was too great a critic, in spite of the limi- 
tations of his age, not to see the poetry in them, though he de- 
plored his " barbarities ". Yet he borrowed freely from the 
older master, took without thanks for his own plays many of 
the things he had ridiculed. In England he suffered something 
of the same fate. His plays were translated, acted with success 
by men who criticized his strictures on Shakespeare. Succeed 
he certainly did, and his vogue lasted until the last quarter of 
the century. i 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 



37 



Many of the English dramatists feigning a greater degree 
of scholarship than they possessed, traced their plots back to 
the Greeks when, as a matter of fact, they are to be found in 
Voltaire; and the crises of not a few other plays owe their 
inspiration to the same source. 

This species of classic play is worthy of study because it 
presents what might be called practical classicism, the French 
adaptation of classical themes that proved so appealing to a 
certain type of mind during the eighteenth century. The type 
differs only slightly from what we may call the traditional 
English class, differs mostly in the matter of certain dramatic 
usages, and makes a convenient transition to the second larger 
division of plays. 

The Orphan of China by Murphy is a good example. Mur- 
phy was a practical playwright who had tried his hand at 
more than one type of play, this being the most nearly correct 
according to the philosophy of the time. It is an adaptation 
of Voltaire's play of the same name for the English stage. 
The scene is remote from ordinary life, concerns in general 
the fate of the Chinese dynasty, more particularly the love of 
a mother for her son as in The Siege of Aquileia; and is pre- 
sented with much ornament and rhetorical declamation. 

Suggestions are not wanting of a stock eighteenth-century 
type of the characters and the plot : the idea of a son brought 
up in ignorance of his parentage, who discovers his mother 
through his emotion on seeing her; and events of state that 
interfere with their happiness; also the usurping despot; the 
faithful servitor who bides the time until the true monarch 
can be placed on the throne — all these are present in the 
Orphan of China as in many a play written in the freer Eng- 
lish form. 

The play is dignified but hardly interesting. It is no easy 
matter, as Genest remarks of another play of this kind, to be 
interested in events so remote from average life. 



28 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

A counsellor brings up as his own son the only survivor of 
a supposedly extinct royal line, and sends his own son away. 
With the passing of time the two youths take part in a con- 
spiracy to right the throne. The commoner is captured, the 
prince discovers his royal birth, and when the tyrant seeks to 
find out the identity of the two conspirators, the mother and 
father hesitate in their duty between their country and their 
blood. 

The despot in a way suggests Tamburlaine because of his 
nationality, his splendor, and his cruelty. But he has none of 
the purple poetry of his predecessor. When he enters the 
drama he talks prose : 

" Hail to this regal dome, this gorgeous palace ! 
'Where this inventive race have lavished all 
Their elegance : ye gay apartments hail ! 
Beneath your storied roof, where mimic life 
Glows to the eye, and at the painter's touch 
A new creation lives along the walls ; 
Once more receive a conqueror, arrived 
From rougher scenes, where stern rebellion dared 
iDraw forth his phalanx ; till this warlike arm 
Hurled desolation on his faUing ranks. 
And now the monster, in yon field of death, 
Lies overwhelmed in ruin." 

This tame Tamburlaine also desires to aid the conquered by 
" yielding to their soft manners, their vesture, laws and cus- 
toms; thus to blend and make the whole an undistinguished 
people ". He is sentimental at heart. He weeps and shows 
conscience over his misdeeds — small misdeeds compared with 
those of the great conqueror of Marlowe. Not one of these 
eighteenth-century tyrants is consistently evil to the end — per- 
haps that would be in bad taste. 

Zenohia marks a departure toward a little more freedom of 
treatment and suggests Fletcher and the Heroic Tragedy as 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 39 

well as Voltaire. Still there is the rigorous attention to the 
unities; but the plot is decked out with military processions, 
and there is some of the panoply of the older English drama. 
The dramatis personae own to familiar-sounding names — 
Pharasmanes, Tigranes, Rhadamistus. Love is the great mo- 
tive: while essentially the story deals with a rightful prince 
struggling for his throne, the real interest is the love of two 
brothers for the same lady. Both of the heroes are passionate 
in love and mad in their expression of it. This is how one of 
them puts it : 

"... love like mine 
Fierce, generous, wild — with disappointment wild. 
May rouse my desperate rage to do a deed 
Will make all nature shudder." 

They are magnanimous in quarrel : 

" I will protect her, will restore her to thee 
Or do a deed shall strike mankind with horror. 
Not even a father shall retard my sword. 
In his own blood I'll drink it." 

The heroine displays extravagant beauty and constancy, loves 
devotedly and to the end : 

" .... I rushed upon him 
And with these arms, close wreathing round his neck, 
With all the vehemence of prayers and shrieks, 
Implored the only boon he then could grant, 
To perish with him in a fond embrace." 

All of these quotations are suggestive in their florid Eng- 
lish. The wording loses the restraint taught by the careful art 
of Voltaire and bursts into the extravagances of Young and 
Lee, without their poetry. The author evidently essays a 
tragedy in the manner of Voltaire, but though he observes the 
more obvious proprieties, his practical training, his knowledge 
of what the stage he is writing for has been used to, causes 



>Q ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

him to develop his characters in the looser manner of the Eng- 
lish and achieve more color and warmth though less dignity. 

Zenohia is near the line that divides the even outwardly- 
classical plays from the usual run of the time. Cyrus, by 
Hoole, is still nearer. 

The idea of this drama is taken partly from Metatasio, 
mostly from Voltaire. But the structure is at once made 
more flexible in the English redaction. The author even 
allows one of the unities to go — naturally that of place: he 
admits a few changes of scene. He also admits, like Murphy 
in the Orphan of China, a love element to complicate the plot. 
Furthermore the conversation, though florid, is fairly easy, 
and ease is not a usual quality in the regular classic plays, or 
even in the Orphan of China'. 

It is artificial in structural character. The action progresses 
as much by asides, exclamations and soliloquies as by legiti- 
mate action. The exits and entrances are awkward. Char- 
acter interest centers in the recognition by a mother of her 
long-lost son; and the really good scene in the drama is that 
in which because of a misunderstanding she repulses him, and 
then finds him condemned to death because of her hastiness. 
With one exception the acts are slight. Yet the play is emi- 
nently actable and reads at least easily, which accounts for its 
great popularity in its time. A happy issue out of their 
troubles for the protagonists is also noticeable, and also symp- 
tomatic of the wishes of playgoers contemporary with Hoole. 
The drama of Cyrus is a long remove from Caractacus. Yet 
they are in the same group. At bottom they have the same 
ideals, are removed from each other mostly in matters of dic- 
tion and external form, because some of their authors had 
more practical knowledge of the stage than others. 

Here, then, is the type of work of those who followed the 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 41 

classic tradition in one variation or another. Those who were 
more scholarly came nearest the ancient ideal in a literary 
way; those who were more practical found themselves inevi- 
tably pulled to the usual method of doing things. And in 
spite of rules and homilies approaching the easy free method 
of the English, that involves " business " or dramatic action. 
Not one of them presents a vestige of real romanticism. The 
nearest to it is paradoxically the farthest from it — ^Mason in 
Caractacus, with the faint adumbration of nature and the lyric. 



The General Type 

A European parliament is divided roughly into three parts, 
like Gaul. These parts are termed the right, the center, and 
the left. The extreme groups afford the most significant mate- 
rial for study since they represent the ultra-conservative and 
the distinctly radical thought of the country. The center is 
valuable to an onlooker simply as an indication of moderate 
opinion — the point of view of the average citizen. So it is 
with Tragedy in the eighteenth century. What originality 
there was expressed itself for the most part either in distinctly 
classical performances or in feeble attempts at Romanticism. 
The middle-of-the-road group simply pictures the type of 
theme, of setting, of underlying philosophy. What kind of 
work did the usual eighteenth-century tragedian do, who had 
no particular " views " to speak of, whose effort was simply 
to write a good play and to appeal to the public ? 

In the era of Dr. Johnson this matter is not a difficult one 
to resolve, since tragedy had approached a type. In this group 
we are considering the plays that do not obviously follow 
classic or French models, or show sufficient originality to sug- 
gest romance of one kind or another; but simply the English 
tragedy handed down from the age of mystery plays, trans- 
formed in the days of Elizabeth and later passing through a 
deep-sea change at the time of the restoration. Through all 
these variations certain essentials retained their integrity, modi- 
fied it is true by French influence, but only secondarily. The 
group is disappointing, for the type represents the natural 
decay and death of the old tragedy that was both actable and 

literary. English tradition had solidified, petrified, until its 
42 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 43 

offerings lost all originality; and a latter-day reader can go 
through the productions at Drury Lane, Covent Garden and 
Hay only to find the same threadbare themes, plots, and lan- 
guage in almost every year-report with few and feeble varia- 
tions. 

The names in this general group are suggestive: Alh'ma, 
Zoraida, Sethona, Cleonke, The Grecian Daughter, Matilda, 
The Countess of Warwick, The Countess of Salisbury, The 
Fair Apostate. A majority of them are named for, and con- 
cern, heroines rather than heroes; the fashion set by Otway 
and Rowe is still current. The names also give an idea of the 
correct background for Tragedy: classic lands, old English 
history and particularly the East. Most of the heroines — this 
likewise in a general way is prefigured in the titles — are 
queens, princesses, or at least countesses ; and the play concerns 
itself with the unsmooth path run by their love. The ideas of 
Lillo and Moore have apparently been discarded. Tragedy 
concerns the great folk of the world, possibly because their 
very remoteness lends them a certain picturesque, romantic 
quality, partly because propriety would suggest it — here we 
have the fashion of the Heroic Tragedy. 

Love is the universal motive of these dramas. We have 
done with the time when broad divisions might have been 
made in Tragedies according to their mainsprings — patriotism, 
revenge, and other passions. The one type is that which has 
to do with the tempestuous loves of great men and women. 

Nor is there much variation in the themes built about this 
motive. Revenge is found often, but not the revenge of the 
Elizabethan drama : here it always has to do with the machina- 
tions of a rejected suitor to rid himself of his enemy and take 
his place in the affections of the heroine. For the most part 
there is merely the case of rivalry for the possession of a 
woman. Even in the so-called historical plays the clash of 



44 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

nation upon nation, the thrill of pride in the glory of country 
is subordinated to the monarch's or the duke's love. Indeed 
when a poet chooses his theme from among the Chronicles he 
makes history over to suit himself, and as Home says in his 
preface to Alfred, he takes as truly noble subjects not so much 
what actually happened, but what might possibly have hap- 
pened, granting such characters and such a concatenation of 
circumstances. The great old Saxon monarch is transformed 
into a fatuous lover and glee-man ; and Warwick, the man who 
made and unmade kings, into a very sentimental monster who 
upsets England not to satisfy ambition or pure lust of power, 
but merely from pique because the king wishes to wed the 
woman he has selected as his own partner in life. None of 
these things actually took place, but the argument is that 
Alfred being young might have forgot his sturdy manhood 
and sunk to the level of the whining lover, and Warwick like- 
wise, to furnish the proper interest for the play. Love very 
literally rules the court, the camp, the grove, and at least all 
men below — Coleridge's dictum. 

In the way of plot we find much stiffness and in general a 
deep regard for the Unities. A slight concession is made re- 
garding background, and in most plays the scene changes from 
act to act. The scenes within the act, however, take place 
almost invariably at the same spot, and variety in background 
is small. There is none of that continual shifting that Sir 
Philip Sidney notices in his time, in which a spectator may 
pass in the course of an afternoon from England to France, 
to Africa, and back again to England. St. Paul's timid ad- 
juration is observed, concerning the doing of things decently 
and in order. 

Unity of time is observed almost as a fetich. The events 
of a play spin out their course within a day's or at most a two 
days' limit. Much happens in that time. In Wanvick a king 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 



45 



quarrels with his chief subject over the matter of a state mar- 
riage, an exiled queen schemes discord in the kingdom to seat 
her own son on the throne; and before the day is ended the 
king-maker has been in gaol, has been released, has been the 
subject of a battle and alternately reviled and wept over by 
his creature the king. In Sethona the hero and heroine fall 
three different times into the hands of the cruel usurper and 
the fate of Egypt changes as many times. In other words, 
probabilities are stretched to the breaking point in order to 
secure variety and movement; yet any transition that would 
involve the passages of months or years is apparently unbe- 
lievable. 

Naturally, too, the action is single. Six to ten characters 
compose the average dramatis personae, which usually number 
a heroine and her confidant, a hero with something of the kind, 
a villain, or more strictly speaking an enemy usurper, and a 
minor character or two. There are no dual plots or sub-plots. 
There is a rigid exclusion of anything like comic interest, the 
feeling being that that should have its place only in a comic 
play. Everything is built around the main theme, the lover 
caught in the toils of a villain, or the lover who has made one 
mistake and pays dearly for it. And at the close there is due 
regard for poetic justice in the distribution of rewards and 
punishments. The feeling of intense depression that comes 
over one after reading Lear, Hamlet, or Ghosts, is never ex- 
perienced with the work of Cumberland, Hook, MacDonald 
and their school. 

The tragedies approach a type in the manner in which the 
events of the plot are complicated and resolved. A formula 
comes into the mind almost naturally after a reading of a list 
of these plays, around which they all might be built with cer- 
tain small changes of costume and scenery: a beautiful lady 
falls into the clutches of a tyrant. Her lover seeks her rescue 



46 



ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 



and because his bravery is equally by his rashness he too is 
captured. The would-be rescuer is condemned to death and 
his loved one to marriage to the captor. If early England is 
used as a setting and Saxon chiefs as actors, the drama is 
Matilda; if circumstances take us to the east, Zoraida and 
Sethona. But the facts are almost the same in the three cases. 
Sometimes, as in Alhina, the conquest by the villain is only a 
mental one, destroying the happiness of his victim rather than 
her physical freedom ; but again the feeling is the same. Nat- 
urally, not all of the tragedies are precisely like this, but so 
many are like it, so many show such a marked similarity that 
it seems as if originality had quite fled the stage. 

The weakening of the fabric that this suggests is suggested 
in a much more serious manner by the increasing number of 
happy endings out of troubles that seem only — could only, we 
might often say — result in disaster. The Grecian Daughter, 
Alfred, The Countess of Salisbury, Zoraida, Alhina, Sethona, 
The Battle of Hastings, Clconice, and later The Carmelite — ■ 
all these are illustrations of tragedies with successful endings, 
so far as the protagonists are concerned. Furthermore, where 
a tragic denouement is achieved, it is often brought about in 
such an unreasonable manner — take, for instance, the case of 
Home's Alonzo when the persecuted wife stabs herself just 
when events are clearing her fame to her cruel husband — that 
there is left in the student's mind the uncomfortable feeling 
that the dramatist has forced matters to an issue he believes 
striking rather than allowed the characters to bring about their 
own happiness or disaster. Is this obscuring of the idea of 
tragedy, making it really read tragi-comedy, due to the in- 
creased acting of Fletcher noticeable as the century waned, or 
a natural weakness due to the dislike of an unhappy result of 
the troubles of the hero and their effect upon an audience used 
to the serious but optimistic sentimental Comedy? 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 47 

Details of plot development offer no novelties. Matters of 
exposition are cleared up by a conversation between the hero- 
ine and her confidante or the hero and his friend, early in the 
play. Sometimes, as in Alonzo, both methods are used in 
order to get the two sides of the misunderstanding that forms 
the entanglement of the play. 

There is much narrative throughout the tragedies, which 
explains why, though much goes on, though there is a vast 
hurry and bustle and leaving the stage and returning to it — 
why everything seems uncomfortably static. Combats, whether 
duels or great battles, are described to, not witnessed by, the 
audience. In The Battle of Hastings, for instance, quite con- 
trary to the old English custom, we are introduced not to the 
battle itself but to a camp back of the lines of fighting. 
Wounded are brought in from time to time, and from them 
we learn of the ebb and flow of the great struggle. In The 
Grecian Daughter the progress of the rescuing army as it 
batters the walls of Syracuse is related to Euphrasia by a 
friend as he looks over the parapet. In Sethona and Zoraida 
a messenger brings the tidings into camp. This is a typical 
specimen : 

"As round the plain, 
At your command, I posted, from pursuit 
Calling our squadrons, I at a distance saw 
Two females issue from yon western gate 
Chac'd by a troop of Turks, but scarce they seized them 
Ere I arrived, and rescued from their gripe 
The lovely prey; when suddenly from forth 
The city furious rushed a desperate band, 
Led by a chief more terrible and fierce 
Than fancy paints th'inexorable angel. 
When armed with lightnings, he bestrides the whirlwind, 
And marks his path with slaughter. On he rushed, 
With headlong fury, while his brandished sabre, 
Flamed in the front, tremendous as the blade 
Which erst at Chad's sanguinary list 
Blazed in the prophets grasp, till, overpowered 



^8 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

Like him by mightier numbers, to the ground 
Disabled, stunned, insensible, he fell. 
While I th'advantage of the crisis seiz'd 
And bore away the prize.i 

What is left of the play is, as with the French drama, the con- 
flict of individuals, a struggle of minds. Feeling perhaps the 
baldness of the background, however, the playwrights at times 
substitute for the vanished battles, processions with music and 
sometimes songs, additions which on the great stages of the 
time would add the splendor of pageant and compete with the 
pantomimes and spectacles that were becoming so popular. 

The complete lack of violence on the stage is reflected in 
the language, which strikes one as being flaccid. The heroine 
is threatened with forced marriage often, but seldom with in- 
dignity. 

"Enough of argument! Know then this hour 
Shall make thee mine ; shall bend thee to my arms, 
Shall change these haughty frowns, and vain complaints, 
To gentle smiles and murmurings of love." ' 

This is the usual speech of command. Even the most vindic- 
tive tyrants conduct themselves on the stage with reasonable 
decorum. 

Nor is there aught that is new in plot-making connected 
with either the situation or development: the long-lost son 
who returns to his inheritance and discovers himself partly 
because of his signal bravery, partly because of a courtliness 
that betrays itself in him despite his rustic upbringing so as to 
arouse admiration in the hearts of the onlookers and a feeling 
of kinship in his unknowing mother (all this is suggestive, as 
are the names of many of the characters, of Mediaeval Ro- 
mance and Heroic Tragedy) . Disguises that are seen through 

1 Zoraida, Act II, Sc. i. 
' Sethona, Act I, Sc. i. 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 



49 



by some but not recognized by others quite as near in blood to 
the disguised one, are very common. In Zenohia, Rhada- 
mistus is recognized at once by an old retainer, recognized 
finally by his wife, but not recognized at all by his father, who 
of all persons would be the one actually most likely to know 
him. In Alonzo, Orisminda feels a deep yearning for her son 
before she discovers his identity; likewise in Douglas. The 
eighteenth-century dramatist was as fond of this sort of thing 
as was Harrison Ainsworth in a later generation. Secret mar- 
riages, or near marriages, in revenge or to save an imprisoned 
lover form another very usual device, used again and again as 
if quite new ; and that they apparently satisfied their audiences 
is testified by the fair success of all these tragedies. 

The hero, like the play he figures in, has become a type. He 
is incredibly brave — this we find in encomiums showered upon 
him by friends or churlishly allowed by enemies : 

" the gallant Edward — 
Who ere the down of youth forsook his cheek, 
Deeds had performed that laurell'd age might envy " ^ 



" Proud, uncontrollable, and fierce of spirit, 
Ev'n in his earliest youth, his boyish days. 
When the grim tiger from the thicket rushed, 
Did he once fly? did he not ev'n then 
Dare the encounter? the fell monster gor'd 
His youthful breast, and if his father's arm 
Had not transfixed the savage to the earth, 
Alzuma then had died. Since that he bore 
The tiger's mark, and ere the down of manhood 
Sprung on his cheek, went from his mother far. 
Grew up implacable of soul, and now 
With dire alarms shakes all the western world."' 

He is not averse to speaking his own praise. In fact, he is 

1 Albina, Act I, Sc. i. 
' Alzuma, Act I, Sc. i. 



^O ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

rather boastful and swaggering, threatening the world with 
high-astounding terms. ' 

" He bred me to endure the summer's heat, 

And brave the winter's cold : to swim across 

The headlong torrent, when the shoals of ice 

Drove down the stream. To rule the fierest steed 

That on our mountains run. No savage beast I 

The forest yields that I have not encountered." ^ ( 

1 
" If I were chained, unarmed and bed-rid old, ) 

i 

Perhaps I should revile; but as I am, | 

I have no tongue to rail. The humble Nerval . \ 

Is of a race who strive not but with deeds. ' 

-Did I not fear to freeze thee with my valour, 

And make thee sink too soon beneath my sword, 

I'd tell thee what thou art. I know thee well." * ; 

Interested in great feats of deringdo' as he is, he is as clay- 
in the potter's hands in his relations with women. His chief 
interest in life is love; and in the mazes of the passion the 
bravest knight becomes a stupid child : 

" Well may I blush ! 
The soldier, chosen by the King, to lead 
To lead his warlike bands, and carry Britain's thunder 
To holy Zion's gates — he whose rapt bosom, 
No flame, but glory, should confess — 
— He stands before you, with a fainting heart, 
To tell a tale— of love." * 

His is no ordinary passion either. He loves to an inordinate- 
degree : 

" If there be a man 
In either host, Norman or Saracen, 
Whose life to thee is death, that happy man 
Give me to know. This is my only wish. 

1 Alonzo, Act II, Sc. i. 
' Douglas, Act IV, Sc. i. 
» Albina, Act I, Sc. i. 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 51 

Hard by him I will tread the bloody field, 
Happy if I can swell the hero's triumph, 
If I can ward a javelin from his breast. 
Receive the stroke of death for him designed, 
And falling think I spare Tamira's tears." ^ 



" Think'st thou a breast susceptible as mine, 
That swells with rapture if thou deign'st to smile. 
Or by a frown is tortured in the extreme; 
Think'st thou a heart like mine will e'er permit 
A conquered slave to win thy least regard? 
Oh there's an avarice in love, that claims 
Each gentle grace, each amiable air. 
Claims the noble hoard of sweets, and will not bear 
A word, a look directed to another."' 

Even affairs of state are secondary. Many a hero jeopardizes 
not only his own existence but the safety of his nation to 
satisfy his heroic passion. Love with him is not the superb 
reckless gamble of Marc Antony but rather a boyish, selfish 
enjoyment of beauty. When chidden for his rashness he be- 
comes distinctly pettish, in spite of his gilded language. 

" As well thou might'st oppose the bolt of Jove, 
Winged with his wrath. Away — lest in my rage 
Thou too should'st perish." * 

In general, he is a rather bombastic creature capable of stir- 
ring interest only in the breast of the heroine. He is called 
by many names, suggestive of the old Heroic Tragedy and he 
has one line that is omnipresent : 

" I fly to love and my Orazia." 

If a blank were left for the heroine's name any polysyllabic 
title would do as well. 

1 The Fair Apostate, Act H, Sc. i. 
' Alzuma, Act HI, Sc. 1. 
' Sethona, Act I, Sc. i. 



C2 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

The Fair to whom he flies is quite a match for him. Nat- 
urally beautiful beyond compare, she is also graceful, svelte 
and womanly to a degree known only in the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury Tragedy. Like Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines, she is given to 
swooning — ^there are so many suggestions of Mrs. Radcliffe in 
these plays that one queries their influence on books like 
Udolpho. Her virtues include nearly all of those listed by St. 
Paul, holiness, meekness, goodness and truth. She has a fine 
regard for her purity. She is capable of sublime renunciation, 
self-immolation. When Matilda, the daughter of Harold, in 
The Battle of Hastings finds herself ignored by Edgar Athel- 
ine for the more common charms of Edwina, she is bitter for 
a moment only. Then she weeps with her rival, forgives her, 
and throws herself on the point of her father's sword. 

Sometimes she is capable of actual heroism. In The Grec- 
ian Daughter, Euphrasia gives suck to her starving parent in 
his dungeon while the crowd gaze on in admiration. Which 
suggests the rather patent fact that the average princess is 
somewhat self-conscious in her virtues as Byron was later on 
in romantic evil. There is always an eye on the watching 
populace. She is seldom known to kill herself — it is not quite 
according to the rules. When overcome by fate the props of 
her life give way, she goes mad. Even here everything is 
conducted according to a system. At times the madness is 
feigned, at times genuine ; but it is in all cases quite unlike the 
mental crash of Elizabethan times. 

Not all the characters, of course, are quite so colorless as 
this : there is a certain fineness in Mandane, in Cyrus, or in 
Orellana, the sister of Alzuma, most of all in Domisminda in 
Alonzo. But it is notable that these women were not the 
usual stock characters : in two cases they were mothers, in the 
other a sister, whose love could not depend on the usual emo- 
tions ; so that the author was forced to work harder and pro- 
duce something with at least some semblance to actuality. 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 



53 



Generally, however, the heroines who are the centers of in- 
terest and action are colorless and forgettable. The age 
seemed unable to imagine strong women, either wicked women 
like Lady Macbeth or women strong in their fine womanliness 
like Cordelia. Strength of character seemed to mean to them 
much parleying about virtue, and womanliness a fondness for 
tears and languishing. No wonder Sheridan when he tried 
his hand at tragedy could do no better than Pizarro. 

The villain is not without his fascination. Professor 
Thorndyke finds in him the one link with the past : the schem- 
ing, wicked man who entraps a good man and woman and 
causes their destruction. He cites two instances worth re- 
peating here : 

" Revenge, thou art the duty I adore ! — 
From thy auspicious shrine I hope a cure 
For the corroding pain that rends my heart. 
The vain Alberti being thus preferred 
By fair Constantia, passeth all enduring! 
Cohedo I have rong'd — another wooer — 
And in his name are such reflections dropped 
As t'wixt the two a duel must provoke — 
My purpose is, who e'er the conqu'or be, 
To reap advantage for my private views." 

— This the opening speech of Seybert from The Heroine of 
the Cave, 1774. 

" What fools are serious melancholy villains ! 
I play a surer game, and screen my heart 
With easy looks and undesigning smiles ; 
And while my actions spring from sober thought, 
They still appear th'effect of wild caprice, 
And I the thoughtless slave of giddy chance. 
What but this frankness has engaged the promise 
Of young Orlando, to confide in me 
That secret grief which preys upon his heart? 
'Tis dangerous, indiscreet hypocrisy 
To seem too good : I am the careless Bertrand, 
The honest, undesigning, plain, blunt man." 



r^ ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

— ^the Opening soliloquy of Bertrand from The Fatal False- 
hood, 1779. The latter has some interest because of its lago- 
like quality, for the influence of Othello seemed greater than 
that of any other old play, and we get a faint adumbration of 
the old motive and villain. 

But even the villain seems to have lost his force in the 
eighteenth century. The large majority of evildoers are not 
at all like those quoted. They are rather sentimental men with 
thwarted ambition who wish evil to their rivals, who plot to 
seize the loved ones they have lost, but who lack either courage 
or decision in their wickedness. In almost every case they 
have understudies to do the actual work for them. In many 
cases they have good angels who try to dissuade them from 
evil. They are torn between conflicting passions, and gener- 
ally, whatever the outcome of their plot, are borne down under 
the intolerable burden of their remorse. 

In Matilda, for example, the older brother, Morcar, im- 
prisons the affianced of the brother with whom he has quar- 
reled. Though he claps the brother into a dungeon and con- 
demns him to death — a tragedy only averted by the good 
offices of Morcar's friend — ^he later releases both of them, rec- 
onciles himself to his brother and swears to lead the rest of 
his life in solitude, " making my peace with Heaven and my 
Matilda ". 

In The Countess of Salisbury, Raymond, who has held the 
countess in durance vile for some time, balks at extreme 
measures suggested to him, and when forgiven by the return- 
ing count, wounds himself, overcome by gratitude. 

In The Earl of Warwick the ungrateful king relents the 
moment he has imprisoned his patron, and knows no happiness 
until he is released. 

In Albina, Gondebert, aware of his wickedness, sees the 
fires of hell blazing round him until in his remorse he very 
nearly loses what little mind he started his scheming with. 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 



55 



And so one might go on multiplying examples. 

When a dramatist really undertakes an old-fashioned vil- 
lainous villain the result, as in Editha's case in Albina, is 
rather ludicrous than terrible. Even the last stronghold of 
the old drama is falling. 

Characterization is in general very weak, lacks individual- 
ization; so much so that actions often have to be interpreted 
to the audience by other actors' exclamations or by the actors* 
own statements rather than their acts. There is too much 
talking, as Genest says of one play, too little action. This 
trouble afflicts the whole group ; even the talk is not inspiring. 

Poverty of inspiration strikes the reader at every stage of 
the analysis. It is just as noticeable in things that pertain to 
setting as in character, plot, motive. The sense of the pictorial 
is conspicuously absent. The average playwright searching 
for a setting, uses old tombs as scenes, gives a suggestion of 
the supernatural with the introduction of priests and portents. 
But for the most part the mere statement that the scene is in 
Rome, Bithynia or Early England seems quite enough, a slight 
suggestion like " a Gothic castle " being all that the reader 
gets by way of help for his setting either at the head of, or in 
the scene. Apparently the idea of the author is to create cer- 
tain universal types acting proper parts; who they are and 
■where they come from is not a matter of great importance. 
We seek in vain that marvelous power of suggestion evident 
all through Shakespeare, whereby he created a scene in the 
imagination. Possibly the introduction of new and elaborate 
scenery is partly accountable for the dearth of historic sugges- 
tion or background. At any rate the imagination is left bare 
in trying to do its work at scene-painting. 

Still again a negative is to be recorded. There is no evi- 
dence of any appreciation of the grandeur or beauty of nature. 
Where it is introduced at all it is a part of a mere rhetorical 



56 



ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 



exercise, an ornament ; what a proper gentlemanly hero would 
use in praising the morning or invoking deity. As in Dryden's 
time we have set phrases doing duty at all times : the " watery 
sea ", " ebon night ", the " reddening concave ", " dome of 
heaven ", " broad orb ", etc. Nature enters, if at all, in the 
soliloquies of lovers and warriors, to make picturesque their 
condition : 

" Why shines the sun thus gaily on the world? 
Why do the feathered habitants of air 
With melody and cheery songs insult us? 

th'unconscious birds 

Chant songs of gratitude for good possessed; 
I know no good — I feel no gratitude — 
— ^An outcast, and undone ! " i 

Sometimes it is a set speech : 

" How dark the night ! The moon hath hid her head, 
As scorning with her lucid beams to gild 
This murky business. Thro'umbrageous trees 
The whisthng Eurus speaks in hollow murmurs ; 
And dismal fancy, in yon shadowy aisles, 
Migh conjure up an hundred phantoms. 
How strong the impression of our dawning years ! 
The tales of sprites and goblins, that did awe 
My infancy, all rush upon my mind, 
And, spite of haughty reason, make it shrink.' 

There is nothing in either of these typical extracts that sug- 
gests that they were written at the time of Burns. Once in a 
while there is a faint shadowing of Gray, like this : 

The gloom of night sits heavy on the world; 
And o'er the solemn scene such stillness reigns. 
As 'twere a pause in nature." ' 

1 Alhina, Act I, Sc. i. 

' Albina, Act HI, Sc. i. 

*The Grecian Daughter, Act H, Sc. i. 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 57 

And there is much dwelHng upon the gloom of night and 
death, the authors of the plays evidently knowing something 
of Young and Blair. 

This mention of two lyrists brings us to the very small 
illustration of lyric feeling noticeable in Tragedy. There re- 
mains the feeling of the Restoration that it is ill-bred to be 
too individual in the expression of emotion both in the authors 
and their created people. How refreshing it would be to 
stumble upon one of the artless Elizabethan songs in the 
dreary waste of eastern love-making, something like the songs 
from As You Like It that sing a love of nature belonging not 
alone to the people who sang them, but to the English world 
at large. But the average song here has the form and color 
or lack of it of this one : 

Beauty as the hour is bright, 

Who in gardens of delight, 

Rob'd with everlasting youth, ; 

Charms celestial, virgin truth. 

Underneath the luscious vine, 

In pavilions green rechne, 

Where believers true enjoy 

BHss which never knows to cloy." ^ 

" Which is pretty but I don't know what it means," as Gilbert 
would say. It is neither poetry nor sense, yet it can be 
matched in Home's work or Walpole's. The nearest one gets 
to lyric feeling is in the fairly dignified soliloquies that fill the 
tragedies of the time, and which reflect some of the senten- 
tiousness of the eighteenth century along with its stoical rather 
pagan philosophy. 

What immediately follows is the meditation — in a tomb — 
of an Egyptian priest at a time undefined but apparently be- 

1 Zoraida, Act V, Sc. 3. 



58 



ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 



fore the Christian era ; yet it would fit very well into the lucu- 
bration of some lesser poet two thousand years later : 

"This is the house of death! The dreary tomb 
Of Egypt's ancient kings ! What now remains 
Of all their glory, but these mould'ring piles, 
And these imperfect, mutilated forms 
Of what they were? The period of my fate 
Will soon be closed. An undistinguished blank 
'Perhaps succeeds. What then? To know it not 
Is not to be unhappy. Yet the soul 
Looks thro' the gloomy portal of the grave. 
To happier scenes of immortality. 
O let not such a pleasing hope be vain ! 
Eternity, thou awful gulph of time. 
Call down red vengeance on the murderer's head." 

Plays taking English subjects just as naturally use Shakes- 
peare as their model, and in a vague, rather unhappy way 
strive to realize a little of his language and technique of play- 
writing — so far as does not interfere with the " rules " of the 
all-wise. 

The opening of Warwick has a slight flavor of the old 
chronicle plays. 

" Thanks, gracious Heaven ! my royal mistress smiles. 
Unusual gladness sparkles in her eye, 
And bids me welcome in the stranger, Joy, 
To his new mansion." 

The verse here is happier in every way than the other exam- 
ples quoted, because it conforms to what might be called the 
English dramatic idiom. And this speech from a later part 
of the same play has not only ease but a certain conversational 
quality missing in the average play-diction of its time : 

" You dare not! 
Thou think'st, perhaps, that I shall sue to thee 
For mercy: no; in Margaret of .Anjou 
Thou see'st the wife, and daughter of a King. 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 59 

A 'Spirit not to be subdued; though fallen, 

Triumphant still; and though a prisoner, free. 

For know I bear a mind above the reach 

Of fortune or of Edward — I have lost 

All I could wish to hve for, in my child; 

And gained, what most I wished to gain, revenge ! 

Or life or death are now indifferent to me." 

The drama from which this is taken is for the most part 
trivial and unhappy ; but this bit betrays the reader of Shakes- 
peare. 

And in almost all there is noticeable as time goes on a 
greater flexibility of verse as if dramatists were absorbing 
unconsciously something of the older school. The most 
noticeable example of this is Cumberland's Battle of Hast- 
ings. It is not too good a play. It does not live up to its 
title to begin with, for the battle is not settled when the fifth 
act closes; and characterization is not always realized. But 
there is ease in the reading, and a fluency of technique that 
suggests at least the good craftsman. Something natural 
appears in the synchronizing action and character of Shakes- 
peare. Above all, in the language, metre, similes, metaphors 
there is more of an echo than one is used to in this rather 
barren time. The result may not be poetry; there is less of 
the sturdy pedestrian quality than in most of these plays. 

Edgar: O Love, 

Small elf, who by the glow-worm's twinkling hght, 
Fine fairy-fingered child, can'st slip the bolt. 
While the crammed warden snores, this is thy doing. 
Lo where she comes, so breaks the morning forth. 
Blushing and breathing odours — 

(Edwina appears.) 

All of this hardly suggests Romeo and Juliet and 

" It is the morn and 
Juliet is> the sun." 



6o ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

But i£ compared with the average dialogue of Sethona or 
Alfred it is not only beautiful, but Shakespearean. If Cum- 
berland is no more romantic than his fellows he is at least a 
finer artist. 

As we look over this entire set of tragedies, this that repre- 
sents the real spirit of England at the time, we experience a 
distinct sense of heaviness. There is a complete absence of 
novelty in theme, plot, and character. Indeed so far as char- 
acter is concerned there is none; there is no real reading of 
life. What we get is a set of pale reflections. There is no 
poetry; scarcely a noteworthy phrase throughout the entire 
series. It is a tribute to the actors of the period that they 
could make so much out of so little material. The old Eng- 
lish tradition, passed through the alembic of classic formal- 
ists, had come to an end. The best that can be said of its last 
expression is that it is dignified, free from rant, from unnat- 
ural passion and clumsy comedy. But the English have never 
taken kindly to rules. It seemed that as soon as they departed 
from the old freedom they never displayed the old power. 
They never fell absolutely into the hands of the formalists, 
but the chill they did receive from those formalists, coupled 
with the transformation of theatres into places for panto- 
mime, spectacles, displays of fashion, was sufficient to rob 
them of the old inspiration. Cumberland's plays represent the 
last flash of the old tragedy — the tragedy that was written for 
presentation at a theatre. 



The Romantic Group 

The dramas published or acted between Douglas, 1757, and 
Werter, 1785, have Httle to offer in the way of romance, 
using romance in its broadest acceptation. Half a dozen plays 
sum up all that can be counted as suggesting anything that 
quarrels with the fashions of their time. And this is all the 
more strange when we consider the number of forces at work 
in the dramatic field that should have turned men's ingenuity 
to the glory of past literature. Shakespeare was being acted 
well and continuously by men like Garrick, Macklin and 
Barry ; his plays were mounted vastly of tener than today, and 
to judge from Genest's comments, to more appreciative audi- 
ences. Many of his lesser known dramas were revived from 
time to time, like Timon of Athens and the Comedy of Errors, 
while Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Macbeth and Lea/r 
seemed to enjoy perennial popularity. Shakespeare weathered 
all the attacks of Voltaire and the English purists who fol- 
lowed him ; indeed the very translators of the French drama- 
tist censured his attack on the greatest name of the English 
stage. On the surface there was never a time when the 
author of Hamlet enjoyed greater popular homage. 

Moreover, the other Elizabethans were coming into their 
own. Fletcher, who in Dryden's time had two performances 
to Shakespeare's one, according to Dryden's own testimony, 
but who had suffered a sad relapse in the eighteenth century, 
saw many of his plays revived, Philaster, The Maid's Trag- 
edy, The Knight of Malta; some, like Bouditca, for the first 
time in a hundred and fifty years. Massinger appears again 
on the play-lists as the century grows old. And editions of 

• 61 



52 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

Fletcher and Massinger are published in 1778 and 1779 re- 
spectively. Tamerlane apparently is still popular. The Silent 
Woman and The Alchemist are presented. Toward the time 
of Werter there is a recrudescence of Middleton. Surely here 
is a public that may be appealed to in a romantic way ; and it 
seems equally reasonable to postulate a few dramatists who, 
in spite of the formulae and syllogisms propounded by the 
rule-makers, will reflect something of what they have seen on 
the stage and something of the thought that in other fields is 
finding expression in Cowper, Crabbe, Blake and Burns. Yet 
the general result is negative, distressingly negative. Now 
and again a play appears whose plot has been borrowed — to 
use the polite word — from one of the older generation; but 
in the hands of its re-doer it somehow loses most of its power 
or charm. Nor is there anyone, apparently, who is independ- 
ent enough poetically and possessed of sufficient dramatic 
ability to produce a play in a free form and with strong 
romantic feeling. 

An examination of some of the later eighteenth-century 
alterations of Shakespeare is not without its interest, and may 
have its suggestion as to why no better original work was 
done by the score or so of tragedians who enjoyed their fame 
in Sheridan's time. 

In 1763 Garrick altered and presented the Midsummer 
Night's Dream. The whole of the delicious drollery of the 
mock-play was omitted, and the remainder turned into some- 
thing of an opera with thirty-three songs. This not succeed- 
ing very well with the public, it was withdrawn, cut down; it 
remained the " Fairy Tale " with Theseus and all the serious 
characters withdrawn, and was used as a one-act after-piece 
to bolster up the serious work of the evening. Grenest, in 
commenting upon the original change, finds that " the dia- 
logue has been judiciously curtailed ", and criticizes the orig- 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 63 

inal version for such vulgar errors and absurdities as Athen- 
ians who talk about Diana's nuns, and going a-Maying; or 
the impossibility of a Duke of Athens before chivalry was 
known, and more strictures of a like kind. Here we come 
across some of the views of the time and later — limitations, 
present-day people would term them — reflecting on the one 
hand the greatest actor of his time, and on the other a pains- 
taking dramatic scholar. A man interested in romance would 
be prone to ask what matter it makes how many anachronisms 
appear in a play like the Midsummer Night's Dream. As a 
matter of fact, the land of romance knows no such thing as 
time, and therefore is a stranger to anachronism. Carpaccio's 
painting is beautiful even though it is full of incorrect de- 
tails — perhaps very slightly because of them. But Genest, 
writing in a very much later period than Garrick — 1832 — is 
so much worried by details that the poetry loses much of its 
value for him. As for Garrick, we can only surmise that the 
mock-play was omitted as is suggested in the review because 
it smacked of low comedy; but it is much more difficult to 
understand how a man of his undoubted taste could have suf- 
fered its transformation into a poor opera. Is it possible that 
all the quality of faerie was lost on him? He was a student 
of average human nature, an actor of extraordinary human 
nature; it is possible that pucks and fairies seemed puerile 
and childish. 

Lear was offered in 1768 by Garrick and Colman, with 
alterations by the latter. Colman was a serious producer who 
had a real respect for the earlier stage. He had sufficient in- 
terest to edit both Fletcher and Massinger, and his attitude 
toward Shakespeare was one of absolute veneration. Yet his 
production of Lear shows the peculiarities of the time as com- 
pletely as Garrick's changes in the earlier comedy. Lear had 
suffered more than once at the hands of later poets and poet- 



64 



ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 



asters. The most popular alteration, to judge from the num- 
ber of presentations, was that of Tate, which changed entirely 
the force of the original. Tate found Shakespeare's play a 
" heap of jewels, unstrung and unpolished ". It was his good 
fortune, he says, to light upon " one expedient that was 
wanting in the regularity and probability of the tale, which 
was to run through the whole — a love betwixt Edgar and Cor- 
delia, that never changed words with each other in the orig- 
inal ". The result, of course, could hardly help to heighten 
the effect of the story. Colman had the taste to be angry with 
the degradation of the masterpiece, and in his own produc- 
tion tried to get back to the original lines and most of the 
original scenes. But he has his own way of going about the 
restoration. " To reconcile the catastrophe of Tate to the 
original story was the first grand object which I proposed to 
myself in this alteration." Apparently it was good business 
to retain the popular love-story in order to give the public the 
" consistent and rational entertainment " that he claims as the 
pre-eminent duty of the manager. His purpose is clear. 
"Romeo and Juliet, Cymbeline, and Every Man in His 
Humour have long been refined of the dross that hindered 
them from being current with the public, and I have now en- 
deavored to purge the Tragedy of Lear." 

In the version that results he rejects as utterly improbable 
Gloster's imagining, though a blind man, that he had leaped 
down Dover Cliff, and omits it " without scruple ". He con- 
fessed to an idea of retaining the Fool, but after most serious 
consideration was convinced that " such a character in a 
tragedy would not be endured on the modern stage ". Here 
is a long foreword from a successful manager that is illu- 
minating for its point of view. He enjoys the poetry of 
Shakespeare but refuses to accept him as he is, misses the 
force of the Fool, one of the greatest characters in the play, 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 65 

and rejects certain scenes because they form a strain on cred- 
ulity. Like some others, he seemed to lack the extra-imag- 
ination necessary for great work, the romantic imagination 
that transcends everyday things. And so, while he gives a 
fair rendition of the original play, getting rid of much of 
Tate's alloy, his practical sense forced the retention of the 
absurd happy ending, in which Lear, a broken-down old man 
in gaol, has sufficient strength to knock down two of his cap- 
tors with a pike and secure liberty and happiness. This is 
not hopeful as an index of either the public or their managers. 
Unquestionably as Genest remarks, Gibber and Tate were ac- 
cepted regularly in place of the originals, though many of the 
other alterations died as they should. 

Timon of Athens was altered in 1771 by Cumberland, who 
shortened, but did not materially damage, the earlier part of 
the play, but added a fifth act which brought the money back 
to Timon, gave his daughter a husband, made the town wel- 
come the old spendthrift under the compulsion of Alcibiades, 
and completely destroyed the underlying philosophy of that 
strong, unpleasant play. 

Garrick altered Hamlet so that the grave was omitted on 
the stage; so that Hamlet did not murder the King; and so 
that his mother went mad instead of drinking the poison. He 
likewise altered Philaster so that the impetuous hero of that 
romance did not actually wound Bellario, the page suffering 
in the endeavor to intercede between his master and the irate 
mob; this being a more gentlemanly and dramatic state ol 
affairs. 

The old dramatists, then, are in the hands of unquestionable 
enthusiasts whose enthusiasm is of their time. They resemble 
the architects who in 1840 restored Canterbury Cathedral by 
removing the Norman tower on the west front and substi- 
tuting another that " matched " the later perpendicular one. 



66 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

And it is to be noted that the excisions are almost always of 
those passages which the average reader of today would call 
distinctly romantic. The managers and altering-playwrights 
with all their zeal were weighted down by the proprieties of 
the purists and the demands of the pit. Shakespeare was 
offered regularly, but often on the same night with a panto- 
mime or spectacle. And apparently everybody was satisfied. 
It is a good thing to take all these matters into consideration 
in a survey of romantic content of plays of the time. 

From among the many tragedies that were offered in the 
span of years indicated above the following may be said to 
have some romantic quality: Douglas, 1759, and The Fatal 
Discovery, 1769, by Home; Cleone, Dodsley, 1759; The Mys- 
terious Mother, 1768, and The Count of Narbonne, by Wal- 
pole (the latter dramatized by Jephson) ; Braganza, 177 S, and 
The Law of Lomhardy, 177^, by Jephson; Percy, 1777, and 
The Fatal Falsehood, 1779, by More; The Carmelite, 1784, 
by Cumberland; The Captives, 1786, by Delap. 

These plays do not belong together. They do not in any 
sense form a " school ". Nor can they be subdivided into 
smaller groups because of their following some particular bent 
of romanticism. They stand simply for a set of isolated trag- 
edies significant in differing degrees because departing from 
accepted contemporary standards ; and earnest of bigger things 
possiby to come. 

On the list are some that have purely an adventitious in- 
terest. The Captives, by Delap, is the later work of a classical 
student interested in Greek Tragedy. He felt the lure, how- 
ever, of the Ossianic legend and laid the scene of his last work 
in old Caledonia. It is too much to expect anything romantic 
from anyone of Delap's training and ideals. He probably 
had not the slightest idea of deviating from anything old ex- 
cept the setting. The result at any rate is practically a mod-^ 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 6/ 

ern version of Euripides with the poetic northern background. 
The people talk and act quite as in classic times and classic 
tragedy. The only suggestion of something new is the use of 
musical names like Everallin, Erragon, Malvina. No use is 
made of the great chance for natural magic. The poetry is 
stiff and unnatural. But the play has its message. The new 
things — or old things — apparently mean more to those who 
read plays than to those who see or act them. This, like 
other plays of a limited group, suggests that the literary 
drama is a thing of the past — it still attracts mainly antiquar- 
ians, pedagogues, dilletanti who are not in regular communion 
with the acting stage. Those who write new literary tragedy 
may succeed, and they may not. In any case the tendency 
toward closet-drama becomes noticeable among the greater 
poets of the succeeding generation. 

In this class likewise have been included the dramas of 
Robert Jephson. One of these will be considered in connec- 
tion with Walpole, since it is the dramatization of his noveL 
The others are classed here more because their author con- 
sidered himself a follower of the Elizabethan school than for 
a more definite reason. 

Braganza, Julia (a later play), and The Law of Lombardy 
go back to Italy and Spain for their stories and settings, in 
this respect at least following old custom. Their type of fable 
is faintly reminiscent of Massinger and some of the later 
Renaissance poets. 

The Lazif of Lombardy concerns two women and two men. 
One of the women — a princess — is sought by two men, Bireno 
and Polydore, by the first from motives of ambition, by the 
second from honest love. Bireno finds that the princess de- 
tests him and has given her heart to his rival. He decides on 
revenge. He tells Polydore he has been on terms of intimacy 
with the princess and undertakes to prove his assertion. Poly- 



5g ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

dore sees him enter the window of the palace by moonHght, 
sees him embrace someone who by her clothes can be none 
other than the woman he has loved. As a matter of fact the 
whole thing is a hoax, the woman in the case being Almira, a 
creature of Bireno's whom he has formerly seduced. 

By the Law of Lombardy a woman accused of incontinence 
was punished with death, but allowed a champion to prove 
her honor. Bireno, in order to cover up his villainy, has his 
accomplice set upon in the forest by thugs. They murder her 
just as Polydore, alarmed by her cries, comes on the scene; 
but before she dies she tells the truth about the scandalous 
story. Polydore appears as the champion of the princess, and 
rescues her. 

The plot has been rehearsed at length because it is very dif- 
ferent from those of most of the contemporaries. Jephson is 
original at least in rejecting the hackneyed love story, taking 
a different theme and a plot suggestive of the Elizabethans. 
His plot, in fact, is so suggestive in part of Much Ado About 
Nothing that it seems at first as if that play had been uncere- 
moniously borrowed from. The author insisted that the sug- 
gestions came from. Ariosto. The fact remains in any case 
that he found more inspiration in Shakespeare than did many 
of his fellow-playwrights. 

Bragansa is a fair sample of Jephson's work for study pur- 
poses. The scene is Renaissance Portugal, whose fortunes are 
at their ebb, and whose government is groaning under the heel 
of the Spaniard. The play vitalizes a plot for the overthrow 
of the tyrant viceroy Velasquez, which is successful and finally 
places Branganza on the throne of a free country. For the 
average person the value of this drama is not its intrinsic 
merit — it has little of that — but simply the use of the old 
chronicle motive of patriotism as the backbone of the play. 
The love interest is practically absent. What holds the stage 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 69 

is the unselfish interest of all the patriots, but particularly 
Louise of Branganza, in the fate of their common country. 

The drama opens with a street scene not entirely unlike those 
in the Shakespeare historical plays, with people passing to and 
fro — in the background the market-place with its bustle. The 
Spanish chieftain enters with his train and we get the idea of 
the story in the comments of some of the lookers-on. The 
rest of the acts are a rather dull, static unfoldment of the 
success of the conspiracy. Two of these incidents are fairly 
dramatic : that in which the Spaniard persuades a priest to 
poison Braganza with the consecrated wafer; and that in 
the last scene where Velasquez, a captive, seizes Louise and 
threatens to stab her unless his freedom is granted. This last 
incident is taken from Distressed Innocence, 1692; in other 
words, the tragedian is eclectic and will accept ideas from any 
source. His idea of what things were EHzabethan and ro- 
mantic was probably more wide than deep. 

The prologue announces the author thus : 

"Vig'rous he comes, and warm from 
Shakespeare's school." 

— which Genest suggests tartly is " an useful piece of infor- 
mation, as it is what one would not have thought of, without 
being told ". 

There is not much of the Shakespearean school in Jephson. 
But even small things are gratifying in a search like this. 
Here is a man at all events trying to do things as Shakespeare 
did them; and there is the faintest promise of revolt in the 
motives, stories and background that are used. 

Richard Cumberland has left one tragedy among his many 
efforts that shows some traces of the romantic movement. 
Cumberland was a clever, versatile, but not ordinarily an in- 
spired craftsman. His work includes sentimental comedy and 



jQ ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

sentimental tragedy; it is always fluent, seldom contemptible, 
seldom memorable. The Carmelite is his nearest approach to 
anything original and romantic. 

The story takes place in the England of the Middle Ages : 
St. Valori, a knight who has supposedly been murdered in 
the Pyrenees, is wrecked on the coast of England near the 
castle occupied by his wife, in company with the man who 
sought his life. Hildebrand, the ostensible criminal, is ignor- 
ant of St. Valori's identity, thinking him merely the Carmelite 
of his disguise ; and it is to the Carmelite that he confesses his 
crime and his remorse. He has profited by his evil work; has 
seized all the Norman territories of Matilda the widow. She 
has given up herself in mourning for her lord and hate of the 
Norman ; she has appealed to the King for justice, and accord- 
ing to custom has been asked to send a champion to represent 
her in the field against the robber baron. For this purpose 
she has chosen Montgomery, brought up to this time as a mere 
page, and suddenly discovers his identity to him. To all else 
he remains a page as before; and the favoritism for one ap- 
parently so lowly born stirs resentment in the castle. St. 
Valori seeing her affection for the young man concludes she 
has secretly married and damns her as faithless. He sends 
back a trinket given him by his wife on his departure. Ma- 
tilda sees this, interviews the monk-husband, and just as he is 
about to stab the supposed usurper of his bed finds him to be 
his own son. There is consequent reconciliation and happi- 
ness. 

There is more of a change here from the general run of 
plays than would appear on the surface. We no longer deal 
with the love of a young man for a young woman — the theme 
of The Carmelite is the continued, abiding love of a wife for 
a husband she thinks long dead — a cherishing of the ghosts oi' 
departed things; and with it the pure affection of a mother 
for her child. 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 71 

The scene, too, has its novelty. It is laid in the chivalric 
•era; and there is a real effort on the part of the author to 
give us some of the pageant of life in those times, its super- 
stition and its romance. 

Good use is made of the remorse that dogs the criminal 
night and day, conjuring up dreams, making everything seen 
in his waking hours a horrid reminder of his guilt ; until he is 
turned into a craven wight instead of the cruel knight of old : 

" I do perceive 
The hand of Heaven hangs over me and my house; 
Why am I childless else? seven sons swept off 
To their untimely graves ; their wretched mother 
By her own hand in raging phrenzy died; 
And last behold me here, forlorn, abandoned, 
At life's last hour, before her surly gate, 
Deaf to my hungry cries : and shall we rank 
Such judgments in the casual course of things? 
To me 'tis palpable that heavenly justice 
Puts nature by, and to the swelling sum 
Of my uncancelled crimes adds all the hves 
Of them who sunk this morning." 1 

All of this he confides to St. Valori. Terrors beset him : 

"Sleep is my horror; then the furies rise; 
Then pale St. Valori appears before me: 
TrembHng I wake, cold dews upon my limbs. 

And my couch floats with tears 

Methought but now by shipwreck I was plunged 

Into the foaming ocean; on the shore 

Your figure stood with beckoning hand outstretched 

To snatch me from the waves ; cheered with the sight, 

Through the white surf I struggled ; with strong arm 

You raised me from the gulph; joyful I ran 

To embrace my kind preserver — ^vi-hen at once 

Off fell your habit, bright in arms you stood. 

And with a voice of thunder cried aloud, 

* Villain avaunt ! I am St. Valori ! ' 

Then pushed me from the cliff; down, down I fell, 

Fathoms on fathoms deep, and sunk forever." 

^ Act I, Sc. I. 



72 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

Both the character and the conversation may be unremarkable 
absolutely; but the passage has decided interest in its time as 
a foreshadowing of the psychology used with such power by 
Coleridge in the Ancient Mariner; and it is noticeable that 
there is almost nothing of the kind contemporary with The 
Carmelite. 

There is another slight suggestion of the Middle Ages in. 
the use of the curse : 

" Rise, iRise, ye waves ! blow from all points, ye winds, 
And whelm the accursed plank that wafts him over 
In fathomless perdition ! Let him sink, 
He and his hateful crew ! let none escape, 
Not one; or if one let him only breathe 
To tell his tale and die ! " 

Again we have rather pseudo-medisevalism than genuine ; still 
it is a departure, and worth noting. 

The author is not big enough to rise entirely beyond his 
time. In many respects his play is disappointing. The young 
knight is still the ecstatic, overwrought gentleman to whom 
we are used. When he discovers his birth and finds a mother 
his words have a strangely familiar sound : 

" Oh thou maternal softness ! hear thy son. 
Thus kneeling, bathing with his tears thy feet, 
Swear to cast off each fond alluring thought, 
The world, its honors, pleasures, and ambition ; 
Here in this solitude to live with thee, 
To thee alone devoted." ^ 

Yet even this is better than most of the filial affection of its 
time, and more sincere. 

Nor is it natural to suppose that a man capable of such 
complete turpitude as St. Valori would in the end become not 
only an abject coward but a repentant Christian; or that the 

1 Act II, Sc. I. 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 



n 



Knight whose life he almost took, whose happiness he really 
murdered, would grasp his hand and give him his benediction. 
It is pleasant to consider, but is it life, particularly mediaeval 
life? It would seem as if the author demanded a happy 
closure to his play. He had read Steele, possibly Kotzbue : 
even the worst of crimes may be forgiven. And both the 
reading of the spirit and the moral value of the drama are 
injured. 

Yet when all is said. The Carmelite had much to recommend 
it. The character of Matilda is particularly good. Sometimes 
she is reminiscent of Lady Randolph in Douglas; and like 
that other heroine she is best in the scenes with her son, which 
are domestic and affecting. The language, too, is free from 
the lush quality that undistinguishes so much work of the 
time ; it is direct and at times picturesque. 

If Cumberland had been a young man when he wrote The 
Carmelite, he might have had a message to the state theatre 
of his time. As it is he has an interest historical rather than 
intrinsic. 

Hannah More's two plays find place here too; partly be- 
cause of their source, partly because of some departures in 
character representation. 

The Fatal Falsehood shows the persistence of the lago tra- 
dition ; a whole company of people in the toils of a sleek crim- 
inal. The play involves mistaken killings, madness and much 
of the dramatic machinery of its own time in addition to the 
few suggestions of an earlier period. 

Percy is a more impressive play and better worth analysis 
as a simple of its creator's power. It is founded, like Douglas, 
on an old ballad. The time is that of chivalry; the back- 
ground the border country, the scene of so much history- 
making. 

It is a tale of jealousy. Elwina had been affianced to Percy 



-^ ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

by her father, but because of a quarrel in the chase the match 
had been broken off; and when Percy had left for the Holy 
Land the girl had been forced into the arms of Douglas. Her 
husband has realized that she has given him only lip service 
and, not knowing the early romance, becomes suspicious and 
seeks proofs for his unreasoning jealousy. These he finds 
when Percy returns from his crusade and seeks an audience 
with the girl he still believes a virgin and true to him. Percy 
and Elwina have an interview, and Elwina tries to recover a 
scarf given to him in their childish intimacy. Her lover is 
captured by the suspicious Percy, who has seen a note men- 
tioning the scarf and interprets it against the seventh com- 
mandment. A duel is arranged, Douglas seeing to it that ii 
he shall be killed his wife shall take poison; she is not to fall 
into the hands of his enemy. But Percy is overcome, Elwina 
goes mad, and Douglas, finding his suspicions unjust, kills 
himself in remorse. 

The play has a mediaeval inspiration, but any hope of ro- 
mantic atmosphere inspired by this is rudely shattered. There 
is not a gleam of anything romantic in the whole tragedy. 
The love of the wholesome out-of-doors that fills the ballads 
and makes up so large a part of the life of the Englishman, is 
not noticeable. We feel almost that Hannah More was near- 
sighted, so little suggestion is there of anything picturesque. 
"A Gothic Hall " is her only suggestion for setting. In action 
there is a certain freedom. The rivals at least fight on the 
stage. Yet when the final dual comes, in which one partici- 
pant must forfeit his life. Miss More, true to eighteenth- 
century tradition, draws a discreet curtain; and we have the 
tale from the lips of the survivor. Hannah More was a great 
admirer of Dr. Johnson. She is hardly likely to stray far 
from the lines he prescribes. Certainly Percy is orthodox. 

Versification is wooden and sudorific save in a few lines, 
which seem to have been taken from the ballad original. 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 75 

" One summer's mora my father chased the deer 
On Teviot Hills." 

"(Some moons have now completed their slow course 
Since my sad marriage." 

The only novelty is in the reading of the characters of 
Douglas and his wife. 

It is natural, in reading the tale of a husband's jealousy, to 
think of Othello. Certainly, judging by the context of the 
play, Hannah More has read the Shakespearean play. But 
Douglas bears little resemblance to Othello. He is gloomy 
and suspicious without the aid of a villain; a casuist, lacking 
both the decision and the fineness of temper of the Moor. 
Douglas has the rashness of Lear in Othello's situation. 

This is a most rigorous husband, quite different in his 
standards from the usual run of mediaeval spouses. He asks 
no proof like his Moorish predecessor : 

"Will it content me if her person's pure? 
No, if her alien heart dotes on another, 
iShe is unchaste, were not that other Percy. 
Let vulgar spirits basely wait for proof, 
She loves another — 'tis enough for Douglas." ^ 

Yet, after her taking the poison, he cries out, 

" Thou dear wronged innocence 

Fair spirit, I loved thee — 'Oh Elwina! " 

— a contradictory character somewhat like the unhealthy- 
minded protagonists of the modern Scandinavian school, sav- 
age, yet weak in spite of it all. 

Elwina, likewise, is a new type of Desdemona; new type of 
ballad-woman; a mediaeval girl with a puritan soul. Some- 
how she is exactly the heroine we would expect from a mas- 

1 Act II, Sc. I. 
» Act V, Sc. I. 



76 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

culine woman like Hannah More, well read in the Bible, and 
the child of a clergyman with distinctly puritanical leanings. 
Elwina has more of Clarissa Harlowe in her than of Desde- 
mona or Juliet; and she owns a strength of mind foreign to 
any of those women. 

Her chastity is almost offensive. She preaches it while she 
acts it. She reminds one of the Christian Endeavor girl in a 
small town who has never walked in the paths of the ungodly 
and, quite satisfied with her rectitude, is willing to talk about 
it for the beatification of others. At times she seems simple 
and unaffected : 

" Percy, dost thou know 
The cruel tyranny of tenderness?" 

or again ' 

" I loved thee most when most I wronged thee." 

But is the same act we get some such declamation as this : 

" Percy, hear me. 
When I was robbed of all my peace of mind, 
My cruel fortune left me still one blessing, 
One solitary blessing, to console me : 
It was my fame. 'Tis a rich jewel, Percy, 
And I must keep it spotless, and unsoiled." 

At times she is like Addison — and Hannah More : 

"My gentle friend, what is there in a name? 
The means are little where the end is kind. 
If it disturb thee do not call it poison; 
Call it the sweet obhvion of my cares, 
My balm of woe, my cordial of affection, 
The drop of mercy to my fainting soul, 
My cup of bliss, my passport to the skies." 

Here, again, is some of the classic sententiousness : 

" Draw near, ye awful instruments of fate. 
Dire instruments of posthumous revenge!" 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 



77 



She is distinctly self-conscious, her death suggesting that of 
Addison. " I would address me to the throne of grace," she 
says as she retires to pray. And when about to die she calls 
her family to her side, kisses them dutifully, forgives everyone 
who has wronged her, and, uttering her salutation to Heaven, 
dies peacefully. 

It is hard to " place " Percy. It is unquestionably different 
from its fellow plays. Equally unquestionably it is not ro- 
mantic in spirit. The true explanation probably is that some- 
one accidentally taking a mediaeval theme cast it in a fairly 
regular mould; but in working up the characters read into 
them her Puritan ideas, so that Douglas and the wife whom 
he always addresses as Madam are really late middle-class 
English dissenters with the primness and talk on etiquette that 
becomes so common toward the end of that century. It is no 
easy matter, however, to understand why the play is consid- 
ered romantic outside this variation of character, the old 
theme, and a possible Shakespearean suggestion. There is 
more romance in one verse of Auld Robin Grey than in the 
whole play of Percy. 

The motive of jealousy that is at the back of More's play is 
also the mainspring of Robert Dodsley's Cleone. The author 
was a remarkable man, something of a character : bookseller, 
farce-writer, antiquarian, the friend of Pope and of Johnson. 
He published a volume of old plays and had a reading knowl- 
edge of earlier literature not over-common in his time, coupled 
with not mean literary ability. 

Cleone (1758) deserves mention in this list and is much 
better as a play apart from its historical interest than many 
others produced at the time. Johnson remarked that, if Otway 
had written Cleone, no other of his pieces would have been re- 
membered. Johnson's criticisms are not always unbiased, but 
the coupling of Otway's name with Dodley's is not without 
value. 



78 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

Cleone is a French lady living in an undefined time during 
the Middle Ages when fighting was still in progress near 
Avignon between the Saracens and the followers of Christ. 
The leader of the Christian host is a brave soldier named Siff- 
roy. His duties have kept him long away from his home, and 
during his campaigns his mind has been poisoned against 
Cleone by his good friend Glanville — somewhat after the 
method of Othello. Glanville succeeds in casting suspicion on 
his prey, in drawing her from her home, in killing her child 
and her supposed confederate, and in wounding her and driv- 
ing her mad. But as in Othello, one or two strands of the 
criminal conspiracy are left unravelled. The villain is tracked 
down just as Cleone, mad and dying in the forest, is found 
by her husband, who realizes his rashness and kills himself in 
anguish and contrition. 

This play immediately strikes one as better than the major- 
ity, though it is another matter to explain just why. There is 
little poetry in it; there are few rememberable lines. But it 
has one thing absolutely unusual in the mid-eighteenth cen- 
tury, truth to life and naturalness of conversation. There is 
a sincerity about it that is absolutely convincing. 

Glanville is of the same family as lago without being a 
shadow. He is resourceful, direct in speech, ambitious, and, 
like lago, not overwhelmed by his defeat. Siffroy is thor- 
oughly easy to understand, true to his age, impetuous, rash, 
but provocative of real sympathy; and Cleone has at times a 
little of that beautiful artlessness that recalls the later Eliza- 
bethans. 

It is in the matter of drama, however, of action, that this 
play is particularly noteworthy. There are little touches of 
premonition here and there, as when Cleone, talking with 
Paulet and wondering about the absence of news from him, 
feels intuitively that something is amiss. Or again when 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 79 

alone in the forest with her child she is terrified by the very 
blackness around her into thinking her enemies are lying in 
wait. These details are not explainable ; but any reader notices 
the lifelike quality of the play so soon as he starts with it. 
Action is rapid and natural, and though the child is actually 
slain off-stage, the pity of it is felt as the mother finds the 
little body and bears it away with her, singing a strain as her 
mind gives way. 

Here is one man among them all who seemed to understand 
the real power to make puppets, actors seem like the creatures 
of real life. With an Elizabethan theme, a thoroughly Eliza- 
bethan villain, and a hero and heroine not unworthy of the 
Shakespearean age, he is either a later manifestation of Otway 
or a real revival of the spirit of the time still earlier. 

Home wrote two romantic tragedies. He should have writ- 
ten more. The friend of Blair, a dweller apart from the 
literary dogmas of the cities, and an enthusiastic reader of 
good literature, he had everything in his favor to produce 
great romance. Yet most of his works are starched and dull, 
and from among the mass of them only two emerge that have 
any significance, Douglas and The Fatal Discovery. 

Douglas has been extravagantly praised. Hume, perhaps 
not an impartial judge, Gray, "Christopher North" — all have 
spoken of it in glowing terms ; and as an acting drama it held 
its own for seventy-five years. Yet one's first impression of 
it is not one of great enthusiasm ; one wonders why the laurels 
were heaped on it of old. It seems " stagey " with the rhetoric 
of the high-school boy; and young Norval is no more real 
than many a less celebrated hero. It is not until after reading 
the great mass of plays of its era and then rereading Home's 
masterpiece that one realizes the hope it engendered in 1757 
that a new day of romance had arrived. 

It has one unquestionable trait that distinguished Cleone — 



8o ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

sincerity. The mawkish love of the average drama is sup- 
planted by mother love. There is a feeling through all of 
brooding melancholy; the language, though artificial, is mus- 
ical and easy of speech. Most of these sensations are experi- 
enced at the first entry of Lady Randolph. 

" Ye woods and wilds, whose melancholy gloom 
Accords with my soul's sadness, and draws forth 
The voice of sorrow from my bursting heart, 
Farewell awhile; I will not leave you long; 
For in your shades I deem some spirit dwells. 
Who from the chiding stream or groaning oak, 
Still hears and answers to Matilda's groan. 
Oh, Douglas ! Douglas ! if departed ghosts 
Are e'er permitted to review this world. 
Within the circle of that wood thou art. 
And with the passion of immortals, hear'st 
My lamentation, hear'st thy wretched wife 
Weep for her husband slain, her infant lost." 

"To thee I lift my voice; to thee address 
The plea which mortal ear has never heard. 
Oh disregard me not ! Though I am called 
Another's now, my heart is wholly thine. 
Incapable of change, affection lies 
Buried, my Douglas, in thy bloody grave." 

Among the characters, Lady Randolph is pre-eminent. 
Glenalvon is a stock villain, Lord Randolph adequate for his 
part but no more. Douglas himself is not on the stage long 
enough for us to form an opinion of him. He appears usually 
as the piece-speaking ranter, his discourse having an air of 
belligerency about it that with its garniture of words would 
undoubtedly give it attraction. It is not until the death scene 
that the pathos of the young warrior taken away from life 
just as he was wakening to its glory, is really felt : 

" I have not long been Douglas ; 
Oh destiny ! hardly thou deal'st with me ! 

Unknown I die; no tongue shall speak of me." 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES gl 

But his mother is the character that one really remembers. 
Tragedy seems to overshadow her. Her life is doomed. Al- 
ways there is the thought of her dead husband, her lost son. 
When her living spouse sings the praises of war, she turns 
away in sadness, seeing only the desolated homes : 

"They go forth 
Gay in the morning, as to summer sport; 
When evening comes, the glory of the morn, 
The youthful warrior is a clod of clay." 

She refuses to be comforted by the kindly consolation of her 
friend. Always there is the thought of the emptiness of life, 
made more poignant by the sight of young Norval. When 
she finds a moment of ecstacy with her long-lost child there is 
the premonition that it is not to last for long. She realizes 
the mortality of his wound before he is aware of it himself, 
and there is the cry of anguish : 

" There is no hope! 
And we must part ! The hand of death is on thee ! 
Oh my beloved child ! Oh Douglas ! Douglas ! " 

There is much of the Celtic spirit here in the abiding melan- 
choly, that lends the play dignity and poetry. We have only 
to compare Douglas with Percy, two plays with much of the 
same ideas, to understand the difference between fire and ice, 
between romance and something very different. 

The author must have exhausted himself with his sensation- 
play. His later work sometimes attempts a return to the 
same theme and feeling, but not successfully. When he does 
achieve once more something in the romantic vein it is Ossian 
who is his inspiration, not the natural medisevalism of the 
ballads. 

The Fatal Discovery is, as Genest remarks, a thoroughly 
good tragedy. It is enacted among the isles to the north of 



82 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

Ireland in the ancient times, and is built about the idea of a 
girl affianced to one chieftain, and then, under the belief that 
her lover is dead, forced to marry another, only to find too 
late that the tale was a lie. This is practically the theme of 
Percy — a contest between love and duty, with disaster at the 
end. The characters, though talking too much alike, are ade- 
quate, dignified. The background is hazily picturesque as in 
a dream or the reading of Malory. And the verse has the 
biblical music of Ossian, monotonous at times, but declama- 
tory in the better sense, and remarkably easy to read. 

Home's romanticism was of the Celtic variety. There is 
not a trace of Elizabethan feeling in any of his work. These 
two plays belong in the class of Chatterton and Percy's 
Reliques as, if one must use a rather unhappy word, rococo 
romanticism, in the style of the building of Strawberry Hill. 

Outside of Home, perhaps more than Home, the outstand- 
ing figure of the time from the standpoint of dramatic revolt 
is Horace Walpole. A dilletante, so fortunate that he could 
have no definite purpose in life, he yet contrived to be very 
useful to humanity. He was a patron of art, of literature, a 
writer of admirable letters, and a fairly broad-minded critic. 
It is almost startling, however, to think that his one drama 
should be perhaps the most powerful and least pleasant of any 
written during his time. 

Two dramas might be credited to the author of The Castel 
of Otranto — The Count of Warhonne and The Mysteriotis 
Mother. The former is a dramatization by Jephson of his 
novel and is full of good things. But it is Walpole's own 
tragedy that is particularly important. 

The Mysterious Mother is founded on an old tale of incest. 
It is a theme used by the Elizabethans, handled in this case 
with fine restraint and dignity. The plot is strong, the mys- 
tery being preserved until the end when it is revealed in a 
great final scene. 



EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 83 

Here is a play that is strangely suggestive of a knowledge 
of the stage in Shakespeare's time. It starts out with the 
coming of Florian, the friend of banished Edmund, to the 
gate of the castle of Norbonne. He seeks information from 
the porter, a facetious, rather ribald old soul like his literary 
ancestors, and like them devoted to the fortunes of his house. 

" Thou knowst my lady, then ! Thou knowst her not. 
Canst thou in hair-cloth vex. those dainty limbs? 
Canst thou on reeking pavements and cold marble, 
In meditation pass the livelong night? 
Canst mortify that flesh, my rosy minion, 
And bid thy rebel appetite refrain 
From goblets foaming wine, and costly viands? 
These are the deeds, my youngster, must draw down 
My lady's ever heaven-directed eye." 1 

This is ready speech, and easy exposition. 

As in Douglas the gloom of impending tragedy hangs over 
the castle. Indeed the most striking feature of this remark- 
able work is the way in which it anticipates the work of Poe 
and, in a lesser degree, of Mrs. Radcliffe, in creating an atmos- 
phere charged with gloom. It has that totality of effect so 
much talked about by the author of the House of Usher, with 
much more power. Every little detail leads to the climax. 
The castle is gloomy to begin with. The porter whispers 
tragedy. Portents are seen by servants and children. Storms, 
the dialogue of unscrupulous confessors, above all the secret 
sorrow of the remarkable central figure, work cumulatively to 
a great crisis. 

The characters are good, well defined — even the girl Adeliza 
has less of sentimentalism about her than we might expect. 
But the real feature of the play — that to which one always is 
drawn — is the romance of mystery. In addition to the things 

1 Act I, Sc. I. 



§4 ELIZABETHAN INFLUENCE 

already noted, there is an artful use of dumb-show from time 
to time. There is a suggestion of the wars of the heretics 
and tragedies of mediaeval France — all of them helping the 
gloom that settles on the doomed castle. And when the 
Countess finally sinks down under her secret, her mind having 
given way, it is not the stage madness of the conventional 
heroine that greets us, but something at once appealing and 
terrible. She reveals bit by bit the events of the night of her 
crime, finally gathers her failing strength together, makes her 
confession and kills herself. 

The dialogue is rapid and epigrammatic, and if it is urged 
that the play is stationary the only answer is that hardly any- 
one at this time seemed to have a natural dramatic sense. 
Even as it is the play leaves a stronger impression than the 
rest in the romantic group. If Walpole had been a poorer 
man — but this is idle speculation. 



Summary 

A summary of the search for romanticism in this first period 
gives results practically negative. The forces making for 
freedom of form and thought, the forces turning interest back 
to the great past seemed hardly to touch the drama. Some 
playwrights were so immersed in the classics that they refused 
to look beyond them for inspiration. The majority produced 
lame variations of old themes with French decorations. Of 
the few plays that show anything that is new Cleone, Douglas, 
and The Mysterious Mother alone are noteworthy. Each of 
these is romantic in the true sense. Two of them, Cleone and 
The Mysterious Mother, have strong suggestions of the Eliza- 
bethan drama. But as a whole it must be admitted that the 
revival that did come to the stage is little more apparent by 
1785 than it was at the time of George Lillo. 

The reasons for this purely negative result are many, and 
perhaps not worth repeating. It may have been as the author 
of Zoraida states in his prologue, a self-consciousness on the 
part of the playwrights that froze any new inspiration. It 
may have been a recurrence of the deadness after Chaucer, 
when his imitators sought so much after likeness to the master 
that they had nothing to say for themselves. Or it may 
simply have been that the age was hopelessly undramatic; its 
genius ran to the novel and the lyric. When a man had some- 
thing to say he usually put it in one of those forms; and the 
drama became much of a by-product. At any rate we come 
back to the original finding that there was practically no re- 
vival of Elizabethan feeling in the drama prior to the advent 
of the German influence and the French Revolution. 

8s 



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